The Progression of Competencies and Dispositions: How do Maturing Software Engineers Compare?

This research paper describes and extends the outcomes from an in- depth study investigating the difference in the expected skills requirements from junior software engineers to senior software engineers, and reflections on the findings from that study. It is a given that senior software engineers have more experience and skills than junior software engineers. However, a focus on their differing competencies and dispositions provides an enhanced mechanism for comparison. Gaps were identified in assessing “professional knowledge” as categorized by the IEEE/ACM Computing Curriculum Overview Report (CC2020), and in assessing “dispositions”. It appeared that the specific scenario of comparing the expected competencies between junior and senior software engineers, tested the framework for assessing competencies developed in the CC2020 project and applied in its mapping to the IEEE/ACM Computer Science (CS2013) approved curriculum. In this study into the difference between Junior and Senior Software Engineers, an initial review of relevant literature was conducted. The review found that research analyzing job requirements for software engineers of different levels was limited; “experience” as a keyword was seldom mentioned; and a common distinction was made between “soft” and “hard” skills - the latter being skills that were “technical”, such as programming languages, frameworks, libraries, and tools, whereas soft skills referred to skills such as personality traits, attitudes, and teamwork skills. In our extension of that work the notion of soft skills was unpacked into professional skills and dispositions. The process of mapping from the CC2020 competency framework to the CS2013 curriculum had deliberately modelled how to represent a competency-based rather than a knowledge-based curriculum. The critical deficiency identified here was the limitation imposed by adopting a skills framework based on the cognitive taxonomy, and thereby unwittingly omitting the crucial companion aspects addressed within the affective taxonomy. This paper explores that limitation and its implications, by extending the mapping methodology used in CC2020 assessing the development of professional skills and nurturing of dispositions. This methodology was employed to demonstrate how the software engineers moved in competency from junior roles to senior roles. A new approach that marries the cognitive and affective aspects of learning “professional knowledge” and developing “dispositions” for competency-based curricula is presented. An example and a strategy for its extension in assessing the development of software engineers' competencies are provided.