Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications
Soft Skills Requirements in Software Development Jobs: A Cross-Cultural Empirical Study
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-2012
Volume
14
Issue
1
Journal
Journal of Systems and Information Technology
First Page
58
URL with Digital Object Identifier
10.1108/13287261211221137
Last Page
81
Abstract
Different parts of the world have different cultures and culture has an impact on the way people perceive, plan and execute any assignment. The success and failure stories of software projects reveal that human factors are one of the significantly important issues. Psychological theories assert that people have different personality traits and these personality traits are pigeonholed by soft skills or emotional intelligence. Most of the studies carried out on human factor in software engineering concentrate primarily on personality traits. However, soft skills which largely determine personality traits have been given comparatively little attention by researchers from software engineering community. The main objective of this work is to find out whether employers’ soft skills requirements, as advertised in job postings, within different roles of software development are similar across different cultures. We used a dataset of 500 job descriptions from four different regions of the world in this study. We found that in the cases of designer, programmer and tester substantial similarity exits for the requirements of soft skills whereas only in case of system analyst dissimilarity is present across different cultures.
Citation of this paper:
@article{DBLP:journals/jsit/AhmedCBC12, author = {Faheem Ahmed and Luiz Fernando Capretz and Salah Bouktif and Piers R. J. Campbell}, title = {Soft Skills Requirements in Software Development Jobs: A Cross Cultural Empirical Study}, journal = {J. Systems and IT}, volume = {14}, number = {1}, year = {2012}, pages = {58-81}, ee = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/13287261211221137}, bibsource = {DBLP, http://dblp.uni-trier.de} }
