What Makes a Great Software Engineer?

Li, Paul Luo; Ko, Andrew J.; Zhu, Jiamin

doi:10.1109/icse.2015.335

Cited by 102 publications

(76 citation statements)

References 70 publications

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“…Table.1 summarized the detailed demographic information of all recruited subjects. The averaged AtCoder rates (1,967 in Expert and 894 in Middle) were equivalent to the top 6.5% and 34.1% positions among 7,671 registered players, respectively. Seven additional subjects were scanned but not included in the analysis because one showed neurological abnormality in MRI images, three retired the experiment without full completion, three showed strongly-biased behavioral responses judged when the behavioral performance of one or more category did not…”

Section: Subjectsmentioning

confidence: 90%

Expert programmers have fine-tuned cortical representations of source code

Ikutani

Kubo

Nishida

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Expertise enables humans to achieve outstanding performance on domain-specific tasks, and programming is no exception. Many have shown that expert programmers exhibit remarkable differences from novices in behavioral performance, knowledge structure, and selective attention. However, the underlying differences in the brain are still unclear. We here address this issue by associating the cortical representation of source code with individual programming expertise using a data-driven decoding approach. This approach enabled us to identify seven brain regions, widely distributed in the frontal, parietal, and temporal cortices, that have a tight relationship with programming expertise. In these brain regions, functional categories of source code could be decoded from brain activity and the decoding accuracies were significantly correlated with individual behavioral performances on source-code categorization. Our results suggest that programming expertise is built up on fine-tuned cortical representations specialized for the domain of programming.

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Section: Subjectsmentioning

confidence: 90%

Expert programmers have fine-tuned cortical representations of source code

Ikutani

Kubo

Nishida

et al. 2020

Preprint

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“…It is widely discussed in the community that hard (technical) skills alone do not make a great software engineer [8] and soft skills are equally important (if not more). Hard skills are comprised of domain knowledge and technical skills, while soft skills are comprised of team and interpersonal skills.…”

Section: Hard Skills Alone Are Not Enough: Have You Got Soft Skills? mentioning

confidence: 99%

Closing the Gap Between Software Engineering Education and Industrial Needs

Giray²,

et al. 2020

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According to different reports, many recent software engineering graduates often face difficulties when beginning their professional careers, due to misalignment of the skills learnt in their university education with what is needed in industry. To address that need, many studies have been conducted to align software engineering education with industry needs. To synthesize that body of knowledge, we present in this paper a systematic literature review (SLR) which summarizes the findings of 33 studies in this area. By doing a meta-analysis of all those studies and using data from 12 countries and over 4,000 data points, this study will enable educators and hiring managers to adapt their education / hiring efforts to best prepare the software engineering workforce.

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“…In the past, researchers investigated certain aspects of software development expertise (SDExp) such as the influence of programming experience [95], desired attributes of software engineers [63], or the time it takes for developers to become "fluent" in software projects [117]. However, there is currently no theory combining those individual aspects.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a theory of software development expertise

Baltes

Diehl

2018

Proceedings of the 2018 26th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of

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Software development includes diverse tasks such as implementing new features, analyzing requirements, and fixing bugs. Being an expert in those tasks requires a certain set of skills, knowledge, and experience. Several studies investigated individual aspects of software development expertise, but what is missing is a comprehensive theory. We present a first conceptual theory of software development expertise that is grounded in data from a mixed-methods survey with 335 software developers and in literature on expertise and expert performance. Our theory currently focuses on programming, but already provides valuable insights for researchers, developers, and employers. The theory describes important properties of software development expertise and which factors foster or hinder its formation, including how developers' performance may decline over time. Moreover, our quantitative results show that developers' expertise self-assessments are context-dependent and that experience is not necessarily related to expertise. CCS CONCEPTS• Software and its engineering;

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What Makes a Great Software Engineer?

Cited by 102 publications

References 70 publications

Expert programmers have fine-tuned cortical representations of source code

Expert programmers have fine-tuned cortical representations of source code

Closing the Gap Between Software Engineering Education and Industrial Needs

Towards a theory of software development expertise

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