Soft Skills and Software Development: A Reflection from the Software Industry

TL;DR

This paper reviews soft skills in the software industry, analyzing industry demands across roles and highlighting the need for greater acknowledgment of soft skills in hiring practices.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of soft skills requirements for various software development roles based on industry data from job advertisements.

Findings

Soft skills are variably demanded across different software roles.

There is a moderate industry focus on soft skills during hiring.

The industry needs to better recognize the importance of soft skills.

Abstract

We review the literature relating to soft skills and the software engineering and information systems domain before describing a study based on 650 job advertisements posted on well-known recruitment sites from a range of geographical locations including, North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. The study makes use of nine defined soft skills to assess the level of demand for each of these skills related to individual job roles within the software industry. This work reports some of the vital statistics from industry about the requirements of soft skills in various roles of software development phases. The work also highlights the variation in the types of skills required for each of the roles. We found that currently although the software industry is paying attention to soft skills up to some extent while hiring but there is a need to further acknowledge the role of these skills in software development. The objective of this paper is to analyze the software industry soft skills requirements for various software development positions, such as system analyst, designer, programmer, and tester. We pose two research questions, namely, (1) What soft skills are appropriate to different software development lifecycle roles, and (2) Up to what extend does the software industry consider soft skills when hiring an employee. The study suggests that there is a further need of acknowledgment of the significance of soft skills from employers in software industry.