Software Engineering Competency Challenges
Adriana Silveira de Souza, Juliano Lopes De Oliveira, Sofia Larissa da Costa Paiva, Alexandre Marcos Lins de Vasconcelos · 2024
Context: Competent practitioners are the most critical factor in accomplishing Software Engineering’s (SE) purpose of building and sustaining high-quality software. Challenges: The demand for competent SE professionals grows faster than academia and industry’s capacity to teach and develop these professionals. There is a discrepancy between the competencies obtained by SE graduates and those required by different domains of the software industry. Conflicts and misuse of SE competency elements and concepts hinder cooperation in the SE community. The simplistic view of human factors related to SE competency hampers its application in SE education, research, and industry communities. Implications: A profound and consensual understanding of SE competency can accelerate SE professionals’ training and direct them to meet the software industry’s needs. Theories and practices based on a uniform construct can improve software quality and increase teams’ productivity.