Controlled Experiments as Means to Teach Soft Skills in Software Engineering

Abstract

The job profile of a Software Engineer not only includes so-called “hard-skills” (e.g. specifying, programming, or building architectures) but also “soft skills” like awareness of team effects and similar human factors. These skills are typically hard to teach in classrooms, and current education, hence, mostly focuses on hard rather than soft skills. Yet, since software development is becoming more and more spread across different sites in a globally distributed manner, the importance of soft skills increases rapidly. However, there are only a few practical guides to teach such tacit knowledge to Software Engineering students. In this chapter, the authors describe an approach that combines theoretical lectures, practical experiments, and discussion sessions to fill this gap. They describe the processes of creating, planning, executing, and evaluating these sessions, so that soft skill topics can be taught in a university course. The authors present two example implementations of the approach. The first implementation lets students experience and reflect on group dynamics and team-internal effects in a project situation. The second implementation enables students to understand the challenges of a distributed software development setting. With this knowledge, the authors critically discuss the contribution of experimentation to university teaching.