Identifying and Amplifying Non-Technical Skills in Software Engineering Education

Industrial software engineering is a young and complex field that is still riddled with challenges to tackle in order to successfully develop a product. These challenges are not limited to technical problems. Most students and applicants are able to quickly adapt to certain technical tools and programming languages but lack other essential abilities required in the field.

Imperfect technical skills for the aspiring software engineer are not the real problem in the industry, but more intangible factors are, such as the ability to work well with others within a culture, to reflect on abstract concepts, … We will expand on existing literature and interweave these essential skills more closely into the curriculum. The ultimate goal is that our graduates have become more responsible junior software engineers that have fewer difficulties working in teams and quickly adapting to change.

When we admit that writing software with others does not always run that smoothly, we can start to see that despite previous efforts, a shortage of software engineering virtue ethics or morals everyone agrees upon, as a global culture, is one of the major reasons that cause teams, and thus software, to fall apart.

Research has shown that there are gaps of knowledge between newly hired and experienced software engineers and a lot of effort has gone into the comparison of courses and required technical skills in the industry. However, given the pace of new software frameworks, it would be completely normal that unexperienced professionals have not touched the particular framework or technique that a company happens to use. These studies fail to see the importance of first learning abstract concepts in order to be able to more quickly learn technical novelties that come along. Most students don’t see the relevance of studying more theoretical foundations like mathematics for that same reason. We will design a unifying philosophy that binds together everything that starting software engineers should know.

Challenges like these can be seen as implicit disparities between industrial requirements and the way in which modern software engineering is currently being taught. By changing the concept of software engineering education, this thesis will show that both problems can in fact be addressed at the source, creating the right mindset for the student. This ultimately translates into an essential set of skills every modern industrial software engineer is required to posses.