Jack Downey

Designing Job Descriptions for Software Development

This chapter presents an approach to creating job descriptions for roles within software development project teams. An artifact-centric skill framework has been created, which suggests a way that companies can create meaningful job descriptions based on the artifacts persons work on and the people they cooperates with. This chapter will describe the framework, before presenting real-world example job descriptions and their equivalent artifact-centric variants.

Careers in software: is there life after programming?

Students interested in information systems and information technology careers can see a clear career path - from programmer to chief information officer (CIO). However, those interested in computer science or software engineering are attracted to the technology and seem not to consider what happens at later stages of their careers. This paper draws on a three-year study where senior software practitioners across a variety of roles were interviewed about their work. The findings show profound difficulties in making the transition from hands-on technical work to a role where they achieve through guiding the efforts of others.

A framework to elicit the skills needed for software development

This paper proposes a theoretical framework to inform an interview instrument. This instrument will be used to investigate the skills needed in software development by interviewing experienced personnel. Based on Social Cognitive Theory, this framework will allow for the elicitation of skill-set information by considering the person, their behaviors and the organization they work in.

An artifact-centric framework for software development skills

While the specific knowledge, skills and abilities needed to develop software can be determined, it is much more difficult to decide what skill set is required for any given software development role. This paper suggests that progress may be made if, instead of trying to relate knowledge, skills or abilities to individual roles, efforts are made to understand what knowledge, skills and abilities are required to create and use the artifacts associated with software development. To this end, a framework incorporating two relationships is presented: The first relates software development artifacts to organizational functions, while the second relates knowledge, skills and abilities to different phases of an artifacts lifecycle. This framework leads to a new taxonomy of skills.

On identifying the skills needed for software architects

This position paper claims that software architects need a unique set of skills that may be difficult to gain solely from academic qualifications and/or training courses. We believe that socio-cognitive factors and artifacts with which software engineers work have a vital role in identifying the skill-set for software architects. Based on social cognitive theory and an artifact-centric framework, we have designed an instrument to investigate the skills needed by software architects. We believe that such an instrument will enable researchers and practitioners to gather the skill-set information by considering the personal traits of software architects, their behaviors, and the organization they work in together with the artifacts they use. This paper explains how the different concepts of social cognitive theory and an artifact-centric framework can stimulate discussion with software architects in order to gather information about their skills. We also briefly describe our experience of using this instrument in a pilot study.

An artifact-centric method for creating software job descriptions

This paper presents an approach to creating job descriptions for roles within software development project teams. An artifact-centric skill framework has been created, which suggests a way that each company can create meaningful job descriptions, based on the artifacts a person works on and the people s/he cooperates with. This paper will describe the framework, before presenting real-world example job descriptions and their equivalent artifact-centric variants.

Software practitioners dropping-out: a research proposal

This paper proposes an exploratory study to determine why some computer science or software engineering graduates abandon their careers in software to pursue radically different paths. While these people may be experiencing a generic mid-life crisis, is it possible that the tremendous technical focus of their work means they are ill-prepared for the senior roles on offer, roles that involve inter-personal as opposed to technical skills?