Non-cognitive Abilities of Exceptional Software Engineers

Abstract

Important building blocks of software engineering concepts are without a doubt technical. During the last decade, research and practical interest for non-technicalities has grown, revealing the building blocks to be various skills and abilities beside pure technical knowledge. Multiple attempts to categorise these blocks have been made, but so far little international studies have been performed that identify skills by asking experts from both the industrial and academic world: which abilities are needed for a developer to excel in the software engineering industry? To answer this question, we performed a Delphi study, inviting 36 experts from 11 different countries world-wide, affiliated with 21 internationally renowned institutions. This study presents the 55 identified and ranked skills as classified in four major areas: communicative skills (empathy, actively listening, etc.), collaborative skills (sharing responsibility, learning from each other, etc.), problem solving skills (verifying assumptions, solution-oriented thinking, etc.), and personal skills (curiosity, being open to ideas, etc.), of which a comparison has been made between opinions of technical experts, business experts, and academics. We hope this work inspires educators and practitioners to adjust their training programs, mitigating the gap between the industry and the academic world.

Everything but Programming; Investigating Academics’ Perceptions of Embedded Soft Skills in Computer Science Undergraduate Education

“…Employers typically display a homogeneous view on the relevant soft skills, just with small differences in the order of importance [4]. Two primary soft skills are teamwork and communication [2,26,35,42,45]. Collaborative skills are also seen to be tied into contemporary methods of working, such as Agile approaches [49].…”

Human-centred cyber secure software engineering

“…Software developers, as keen problem solvers, enjoy putting pieces of code together to produce a working piece of software (Wynekoop and Walz 2000 ; Groeneveld et al. 2020 ). Brooks ( 1975 ) says: “ The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff” (p. 7).…”

Hashing It Out: A Survey of Programmers' Cannabis Usage, Perception, and Motivation

“…Thus, questions of cannabis prevalence, usage motivations, and culture in software engineering remain unanswered. However, cannabis use has been studied in the context of creative problem solving, a key component of many software engineering tasks [23,24,43]. Generally, cannabis is seen as a creativity enhancer: in one study, 54% of participants believed it increased their creativity [22].…”