Introducing an Approach to Developing Egoless Software Engineers

Abstract

IntroductionA software organization typically operates in three dimensions for increasing productivity -process, technology and people. There is considerable literature on the process and technology dimensions 1, 2 but very little on the people dimension 3 . Glass, et al 3 have studied 369 papers in 6 leading journals and discovered that Software Engineering research is fundamentally about technical and computing issues and that it is seldom about behavioral issues. In industry, discussion about the people dimension is generally limited to training for new processes and technologies 4 . Since this approach has not accrued any perceptible gains in productivity 5 , we believe that there is a case for exploring the people dimension deeply and earnestly.The major contribution of this paper is to put forth a multi-stage approach to develop egoless programmers as advocated by Weinberg. We are using contemporary terms like egoless engineering and development or general terms like egoless behavior to mean the same thing i.e. egoless programming. Our multi-stage approach consists of developing an instrument to assess "egoless behavior" of individuals, validating the self-assessment with peers' assessments and formulating group and individual action plans. The paper reports self-assessment and team-assessment using the instrument. The sample size consists of 86 software engineering students of a junior class of a computer engineering undergraduate program. The analysis includes "egoless" behavior of the class based on self-assessment and team-assessment, as well as their correlation with determinants like gender, semester and cumulative grade point averages (SGPA and CGPA).The next section discusses the background behind the problem of productivity in software organizations followed by the research design of our experiment leading to analysis of the results and ending with concluding remarks.

Applying "The New Age of Innovations Principles" to Software Engineering Education

“…The feedback highlighted the impact of the principle. While some researchers have questioned the efficacy of learning style assessments [21][22] , some others have found them to be helpful [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23] . In our experience, they indeed added value.…”

“…Lamont Adams elaborated the concept with ten commandments. Waychal 17 used these ten commandments to develop an instrument to measure egoless behavior of students, which is important for teamwork 15 . He has found the instrument to be reliable 17 .…”

“…Waychal 17 used these ten commandments to develop an instrument to measure egoless behavior of students, which is important for teamwork 15 . He has found the instrument to be reliable 17 . We sought information on students' academic performance ( Cumulative Grade Point Average (CGPA) and Semester Grade Point Average (SGPA)), the subjects that they liked and disliked and their performances in them and their volitional activities such as academic electives , co-curricular and extra-curricular activities.…”