What Characterizes a Software Leader? Identifying Leadership Practices from Practitioners Social Media

TL;DR

This study analyzes 116 practitioner-authored articles to identify and categorize leadership practices in software development, highlighting key recommended and discouraged behaviors based on real-world experiences.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive categorization of 103 leadership practices from practitioners' narratives, emphasizing managerial and interpersonal skills over technical expertise.

Findings

Identified 103 leadership practices for software project leaders.

Practices are organized into five categories including People Management and Communication.

Recommended practices focus on interpersonal skills and delegation, discouraged ones include micromanagement.

Abstract

Context: Leadership has been extensively studied in management and agile software development; however, prior research predominantly focuses on formal roles and predefined leadership models, offering limited insight into how leadership is experienced and demonstrated by software practitioners in everyday practice. Objective: Our goal is to identify and categorize leadership practices as perceived and reported by software development practitioners based on their professional experiences. Method: We conducted a content analysis of 116 practitioner-authored articles published on the Dev.to online community. Articles were systematically collected, screened, and coded, resulting in the extraction, correlation analysis and categorization of leadership practices grounded in practitioners narratives. Results: We identified 103 practices for software project leaders, distinguished between recommended and discouraged ones. These practices were organized into five categories: People Management & Development, Processes & Execution, Professional & Personal Growth, Communication & Articulation and Strategic Vision. The most recurrent recommended practices include Cultivating & Practicing Interpersonal Skills, Managing & Delegating Team Work, and Practicing & Developing Managerial Skills, whereas Micromanagement, Counterproductive Work Patterns, and Counterproductive Communication Styles emerged as the most frequent discouraged practices. We organized all practices into a conceptual map. Conclusion: The findings indicate that software leadership is mainly associated with managerial and interpersonal practices rather than technical expertise. The resulting conceptual map summarizes these practices and can serve as a reference for understanding leadership in software development contexts.