Competence gaps in software personnel: A multi-organizational study

Abstract

a b s t r a c tToday, the innovation and quality of the software industry's products and services depend to a great extent on the knowledge, ability and talent applied by software engineers. At the same time, human aspects are recognized as one of the main problems associated with software development projects. More specifically, inefficiencies usually come from inadequate verification of software engineers' competences. Another issue is the lack of an established career for software engineers, which adds difficulties to eval uate competences. With these challenges in mind, this paper presents a study conducted in the software industry to test competence gaps among software practitioners, comparing the 360 degree feedback results and self evaluations with that of standard competence levels. The results of this research may be very valuable to organizations immersed in software development projects.

An examination of personality traits and how they impact on software development teams

“…People are key for software development processes [1] and personnel factors are one of the elements that can impact the effectiveness and productivity of software teams [2]. These teams rely on the communication skills and abilities of a software development team, and therefore the productivity of a software organization is affected by the levels of social cohesion among its members [3].…”

DeCom: A model for context-aware competence management

“…Furthermore, in DeCom, each competence must be associated with a proficiency level. At DevERP, competences were classified as: undeveloped (1), early development (2), partially developed (3), developed (4), and fully developed (5).…”

“…Competence management [1][2][3][4] involves mapping organizational competences needs, identifying competence gaps [5], and filling these gaps through sourcing, training, coaching and other corporate education activities [2,6,7].…”

A Social Network to Increase Collaboration and Coordination in Distributed Teams

“…To do this, each person provides, and his/her profile shows, information about their working hours, their current status regarding availability (see right-hand side of Trusty screens in Figure 2), the time people prefer to be contacted, etc. In addition, it has been shown that interruptions have a negative impact on task completion time [14,30], decision-making [31,32], and people's emotional states [33]. Interruptions may also result in prospective memory failure [30,34], which refers to the fact that an individual may have a problem remembering what s/he has to do as regards a planned task (or in this case, the interrupted task).…”