Culture dimensions in software development industry: The effects of mentoring

Software development is a human centric and sociotechnical activity and like all human activities is influenced by cultural factors. However, software engineering is being further affected because of the globalization in software development. As a result, cultural diversity is influencing software development and its outcomes. The software engineering industry, a very intensive industry regarding human capital, is facing a new era in which software development personnel must adapt to multicultural work environments. Today, many organizations present a multicultural workforce which needs to be managed. This paper analyzes the influence of culture on mentoring relationships within the software engineering industry. Two interesting findings can be concluded from our study: (1) cultural differences affect both formal and informal mentoring, and (2) technical competences are not improved when implementing mentoring relationships

Evaluating the Demand for Soft Skills in Software Development

An analysis of 500 advertisements for IT positions focuses on the soft skills mentioned in the ads, revealing which soft skills are in high demand for software development and which ones are neglected despite their importance

Soft Sides of Software

Software is a field of rapid changes: the best technology today becomes obsolete in the near future. If we review the graduate attributes of any of the software engineering programs across the world, life-long learning is one of them. The social and psychological aspects of professional development is linked with rewards. In organizations, where people are provided with learning opportunities and there is a culture that rewards learning, people embrace changes easily. However, the software industry tends to be short-sighted and its primary focus is more on current project success; it usually ignores the capacity building of the individual or team. It is hoped that our software engineering colleagues will be motivated to conduct more research into the area of software psychology so as to understand more completely the possibilities for increased effectiveness and personal fulfillment among software engineers working alone and in teams

Universality of Egoless Behavior of Software Engineering Students

Software organizations have relied on process and technology initiatives to compete in a highly globalized world. Unfortunately, that has led to little or no success. We propose that the organizations start working on people initiatives, such as inspiring egoless behavior among software developers. This paper proposes a multi-stage approach to develop egoless behavior and discusses the universality of the egoless behavior by studying cohorts from three different countries, i.e., Japan, India, and Canada. The three stages in the approach are self-assessment, peer validation, and action plan development. The paper covers the first stage of self-assssment using an instrument based on Lamont Adams’ Ten commandments (factors) of egoless programming – seven of the factors are general, whereas three are related to coding behavior. We found traces of universality in the egoless behavior among the three cohorts such as there was no difference in egoless behaviours between Indian and Canadian cohorts and both Indian and Japanese cohorts had difficulties in behaving in egoless manner in coding activities than in general activities

Innovations in Information Systems Education-VIHKNet: Instilling Realism Into the Study of Emerging Trends

In this paper we describe explicit materials that were generated in an ongoing effort to help undergraduate and Masters-level students learn about off-shore outsourcing and radical technical changes in Information Technology development, and the environment in which these materials were developed and continue to be distributed. The environment provides a realistic, effective way for students to learn about emerging trends. Over the last seven years, we tried to bring realism into Information Systems education through a joint project between universities in Hong Kong, Orlando, Tilburg, Eindhoven, Grenoble, and more recently, Beijing. The HKNET project offers an integrated learning activity across multiple international institutions and brings Information Systems reality into educational contexts. It allows students to focus on organizational trends

Towards classifying sociocultural aspects in global software development

The geographical, temporal distances and socio-cultural differences are the biggest challenges for Global Software Development (GSD). In GSD, it is necessary to deal with behaviors, values and skills of the team members, conflicts, rework, delays, etc. can influence a software production process. The objective of this paper is to identify the sociocultural aspects and propose a classification structure under different analytical perspectives in order to offer adequate support to the management of GSD teams. A systematic mapping and proposal an approach that classifies aspects in three perspectives: collaboration, people and external. The analysis allows the project manager to make decisions about the performance of human resources and mitigate problems arising from communication, cooperation and coordination, generating better results in indicators of productivity, quality and efficiency of GSD teams

Behavioral adaptation within cross-cultural virtual teams

With today\u27s business environments no longer confined to national borders, much work is undertaken in global virtual teams. Such teams consist of members located in different countries that communicate via technology media to complete a project task. Much of the research in this area has been focused on the technological aspects of such environments; there is, however, a lack of research into the behavioral aspects and the issue of cultural differences in particular. It has been acknowledged that when cultural diversity is neither recognized nor acted upon, significant challenges can arise for the team. Current advice in the literature suggests that team members should adapt their normal working behavior in consideration of cultural differences. However, there is little indication of how team members should do so. This study investigated if and/or how team members adapt their behavior in cross-cultural virtual teams. The results of this study indicate that team members can adapt their behavior in both spoken and written communication as well as allowing for religious beliefs and time zone differences. This paper discusses specifically how behavior can be adapted, including a discussion of behaviors that caused concern. Finally, a framework of behavioral adaptations is presented for ways to improve cross-cultural virtual team interactions.<br /

Analysis and Design in the IS Curriculum: Taking it to the Next Level

Recent surveys of methodologies and techniques currently used in organizations for developing information systems indicate significant trends that call for a revision of the Information Systems (IS) Systems Analysis and Design (SA&D) course to define what methodologies, techniques, models, and tools need to be taught. Several course-related and environment governed trends seem to impact the coverage, including the growing popularity of object-oriented techniques, the shortening of the life cycle and the emergence of the iterative approach, the increasing adoption of the agile approach, the rising importance of UML, the outsourcing trend leading to global distribution of SA&D work, and the rate of change in the technical and business environments. The scope of the SA&D course has increased. Yet, most MIS degree programs have just one SA&D course. The typical SA&D instructor faces a number of difficult questions when trying to fit the much larger range of topics into a single course. A panel at the Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS) 2007 conference evaluated how the trends impact the coverage of the SA&D course and made recommendations on how these trends can be addressed. Based on the panel discussion, this paper tackles the many challenges of teaching analysis and design in the IS curriculum and taking it to the next level

Soft Skills Requirements in Software Development Jobs: A Cross-Cultural Empirical Study

Purpose: Most of the studies carried out on human factor in software development concentrate primarily on personality traits. However, soft skills which largely help in determining personality traits have been given comparatively little attention by researchers. The purpose of this paper 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. Design/methodology/approach: The authors review the literature relating to soft skills before describing a study based on 500 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. Findings: It was found that in the cases of designer, programmer and tester, substantial similarity exists for the requirements of soft skills, whereas only in the case of system analyst is dissimilarity present across different cultures. It was concluded that cultural difference does not have a major impact on the choice of soft skills requirements in hiring new employee in the case of the software development profession. Originality/value: Specific studies concerning soft skills and software development have been sporadic and often incidental, which highlights the originality of this work. Moreover, no concrete work has been reported in the area of soft skills and their demand as a part of job requirement sets in diverse cultures, which increases the value of this paper