Soft skills for newborn software engineers in agile teams

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Int. J. Agile Systems and Management, Vol. 14, No. 1, 2021 27
Soft skills for newborn software engineers in agile
teams
Suzana C.B. Sampaio*, Thiago Alves Bastos
and Marcelo L.M. Marinho
Computer Department,
Federal Rural University of Pernambuco,
Recife, PE, 52071-030, Brazil
Email: suzana.sampaio@ufrpe.br
Email: alves.thiagobastos@gmail.com
Email: marcelo.marinho@ufrpe.br
*Corresponding author
Abstract: Agile methodologies have become an appealing option. The people-
centered set of values and principles increases people’s factors relevance.
Furthermore, an agile environment must enable software engineers to work
efficiently, to collaborate, and to share skills. However, these factors are often not
fully understood by agile practitioners. This paper investigates the required soft
skills for software engineers in an agile team. In order to do that, a comprehensive
literature review helped to categorise the soft skills found in the literature. Also,
we conducted a survey with 63 software engineers. Based on the respondents
profile, the 8 most important skills were selected and they are discussed and
included in a software instrument for self-evaluation that also presents some
recommendations. The instrument was tested and recommended by a group of
software engineers. This research can be used by young software engineers and
academic communities to improve the software engineers’ soft skills.
Keywords: soft skills; behavioural competence; people factors; agile
methodologies; software engineers; agile teams.
Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Sampaio, S.C.B., Bastos, T.A.
and Marinho, M.L.M. (2021) ‘Soft skills for newborn software engineers in agile
teams’, Int. J. Agile Systems and Management, Vol. 14, No. 1, pp.27–52.
Biographical notes: Suzana C.B. Sampaio is a full time lecturer and researcher
at the Department of Computer Science (DC) at the Federal Rural University of
Pernambuco in Brazil. She has extensive experience in the systems, products,
and software development industry (20+ years) with strong expertise as a
consultant (10+ years) in process improvement, agile methodologies, and project
management helping 50+ companies to achieve their business goals. Her research
interest includes software engineering, project management, agile methodologies,
human and social aspects of projects among others.
Thiago Alves Bastos is a Software Engineer at C.E.S.A.R and a last year Computer
Science student at Federal Rural University of Pernambuco (UFRPE). This paper
is a result of his Graduation Thesis. Besides, he has an interest in the following
lines of research software engineering, agile methodologies, human and social
aspects of computing projects, and others.
Copyright © 2021 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

28 S.C.B. Sampaio et al.
Marcelo L.M. Marinho is an Adjunct Professor and researcher at the Department
of Computer Science (DC) at the Federal Rural University of Pernambuco in
Brazil (UFRPE). He was a post-doctoral researcher at Lero – the Irish Software
Research Centre at the University of Limerick. He has a PhD in Computer Science
(2015) from the Informatics Centre at Federal University of Pernambuco (CIn-
UFPE) in Software Project Management area. He has a Masters in Computer
Science (2010) from the University Federal of Pernambuco (UFPE) and has
a Batchelor’s degree in Computer Science from the Catholic University of
Pernambuco. He has been working in the Software Engineering field for 13 years.
Besides, he has an interest in the following lines of research: software engineering,
global software development, agile methodologies, software project management,
and human and social factors of software engineering.
1 Introduction
Increased agility is a magnet to all organisations (Stoica et al., 2013). Agile methodologies
have been the most noticeable change in the world of software development and are the
most used methodologies for software projects worldwide (Abbas et al., 2008; VersionOne,
Collabnet, 2019; Grimaldi et al., 2016). The shift in mindset brought about by the Agile
Manifesto shows that the most important part in a software development project is the
people involved, not the processes and heavy documentation (Cockburn and Highsmith,
2001), fitting much better into the dynamic environments that were emerging (Palmquist
et al., 2013).
Some authors present human factors as the most fundamental factors in Agile techniques
(Cockburn and Highsmith, 2001; Lee, 2008; Suomalainen et al., 2015). Others claim that
the human dimension can be even more important than the technical side (Acuna et al.,
2006). However, human factors are not fully understood by practitioners who work within
an Agile software environment, and, consequently, it has not been completely explored
(Papatheocharous et al., 2014). This has led to a gap between what companies are expecting
from their software engineers (SEs) and what the engineers really know, in terms of soft
skills (SKs), especially in their first-time jobs, and it has to be a reality in Brazil and also
abroad (Fagerholm and Vihavainen, 2013; Valentin et al., 2015). The gap is caused mainly
by a lack of behavioural competencies, not because of the technical knowledge of the SEs
(Fagerholm and Vihavainen, 2013).
Additionally, there is a call for research on what SKs relate to company-specific
processes, such as the software development methodology they use (Matturro, 2013). There
is also a lack of studies on which behavioural competences are the most relevant for those
beginning their careers in software development, the newborn SEs. Moreover, there is a
lack of understanding of how to improve these skills.
Consequently, it is necessary to improve and extend our understanding of SKs for SEs
within agile teams, especially for those with less than five years of experience. This leads
us to the following research question: What are the most relevant soft skills for software
engineers working within Agile teams? How can we help newborn SEs in understanding
and improving their SKs?

Soft skills for newborn software engineers in agile teams 29
To this end, we conducted a literature review, with the objective of gathering relevant
SKs for SEs working in Agile environments. We also run a survey at the Porto Digital Park
(PDP) (one of the largest technological parks in Brazil) to rank the most-cited SKs gathered
from the literature review and to understand how software organisations perceive the value
of SKs.
Finally, as a result of this study, a minimum viable product (MVP) of a software
application was developed to diagnose the strengths and weaknesses of SKs for SEs. We
use a self-assessment to determine how good an SE is at these skills and discover some
areas for improvement. This instrument was made especially for recently graduated junior
SEs in the first five years of their careers and for those about to graduate. It is meant to
foster discussion about what are the relevant SKs for SEs in Agile environments and how
to help them improve their behavioural competencies.
This paper is organised as follows. Section 2 shows the background. Section 3 presents
the methodology applied in this work and gives details about our research steps. Section 4
lists the preliminary results obtained during this research. Section 5 presents the development
process and the results of the MVP software and its feedback. Finally, Section 6 discusses
the main contributions of this work, the impact for the industry and academia, its limitations,
and suggestions for future work.
2 Background
2.1 Agile methodologies
Martin Fowler, Jim Highsmith, and 15 other practitioners published a work called
“Manifesto for Agile Software Development” with the objective of revealing better ways
of developing software (Fowler and Highsmith, 2001), working as an alternative to the
traditional mindset, which is a single pass software development life cycle (Abbas et al.,
2008). Their work presented a set of values and principles, which are followed by the Agile
methodologies.
Agile development processes work better in a people-centred culture (Cockburn and
Highsmith, 2001), as seen in such Agile principles as “Individuals and interactions over
processes and tools”, “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation”, and “Responding
to change over following a plan” (Fowler and Highsmith, 2001). The values are related
to human factors, like people’s ability to communicate and empathise with each other,
the ability to negotiate, and the courage to accept change. Collaboration, trust, verbal
communication, and continuous delivery are at the core of the Agile method. They are
building blocks to a mindset that allows an Agile team to have a positive impact in any
organisation (Marinho et al., 2019). By dissecting the principles, we can derive their
relationships to human factors. Figure 1 shows only six principles (out of 12) from the
manifesto (Fowler and Highsmith, 2001), and the authors’ reflections regarding their
relations to non-technical skills.
There are many Agile methodologies, among these, Scrum is the most popular
(VersionOne, Collabnet, 2019), followed by eXtreme Programming (XP) (Hamed and
Abushama, 2013). The characteristics of Scrum matches perfectly with the values and
principles of the Agile Manifesto. It values continues delivery, changes being welcomed
rather than resisted, and self-organised teams, meaning that people within the project must
be able to manage their tasks and know their responsibilities. The key factors for the success

30 S.C.B. Sampaio et al.
of a project using Scrum are human factors like communication (Cockburn and Highsmith,
2001; Bootla et al., 2015; Schwaber and Sutherland, 2013; Singh et al., 2015).
Figure 1 Agile principles and soft skills (see online version for colours)
According to Vijayasarathy and Turk (2008), knowledgeable agile development team
members said that factors influencing the use of Agile include
•corporate team culture
•improved communication and collaboration
•availability of the required skill sets.
Dyba and Dingsoyr (2009) determined that the key characteristics of agile development
are collaboration and communication, embracing conflict, and supporting creativity and
innovation.
Although Agile software development is considered “a set of iterative and incremental
software engineering methods that are advocated based on an ‘agile philosophy’ captured
in the Agile Manifesto” (Dikert et al., 2016), the human factors in an Agile environment are
very important (Papatheocharous et al., 2014). Moreover, the most significant limitations
of Agile are related to the lack of specific professional skills (Solinski and Petersen, 2016),
including the SKs.
2.2 Soft skills
Human dimensions are an essential part of any product development venture (Abdalhamid
and Mishra, 2017). Loufrani-Fedida and Missonier (Loufrani-Fedida and Missonier, 2015)
define “strong” project managers as those who can deal with “soft” issues related to people
and relationships, and who not only manage projects but also drive value. For Software
Engineers (SE) it is no different.
Mastering the individual competencies in an Agile environment is very important.
Understanding those factors will allow an understanding of the technical characteristics and

Soft skills for newborn software engineers in agile teams 31
the behavioural aspects, such as communication, teamwork, and leadership, of all people
involved in the process (Cockburn and Highsmith, 2001; Bootla et al., 2015; Bushuyeva
et al., 2018; Amorim et al., n.d.).
The behavioural aspects of software engineering are the focus of this work. According
to Papatheocharous et al. (2014), the lack of control of these characteristics is the main cause
of failure in software projects, and these characteristics are harder to develop or learn than
technical skills (Gardiner, 2005). However, to understand the behavioural aspects, first, it is
necessary to understand what individual competencies are. Table 1 shows a set of definitions
of individual competence found in the literature.
Table 1 Individual competency definitions
The combined use of knowledge, skill, Jones and Voorhees (2002)
and experience required to fulfil a specific task and Voorhees (2001)
Measurable human capabilities that are required to Marrelli (1998)
fulfil work performance demands effectively
A standardised requirement for an individual Brozova and Subrt (2008)
to perform a specific job properly,
encompassing a combination of skills, knowledge,
and behaviours used to improve performance
Ways to put into practice some knowledge, know-how, Berio and Harzallah (2005)
and attitudes in a specific context
The combined use of knowledge, skills, (International Project Management
and abilities to accomplish the desired result Association, IPMA)
As shown in Table 1, there is no consensus in the literature on the definition of individual
competence (Winterton et al., 2006), although they have some consistencies between
them, such as the use of knowledge, experience, skills, and abilities to accomplish the
desired result. In this work, we use these common ideas to define competency as “the
use of knowledge, experience, skills, and abilities to accomplish a desired result”, where
knowledge includes “theoretical (e.g., knowing the second law of thermodynamics) and
procedural knowledge (e.g., knowing the procedure for assembling a particular electronic
card)” (Trichet and Leclère, 2003), skills includes “formalised and empirical know-how
(e.g., tricks, abilities, or talents)” (Trichet and Leclère, 2003), and ability is “the effective
delivery of knowledge and skills in a given context” (International Project Management
Association , IPMA).
The international project management association Individual defined the individual
competence baseline (ICB) 4.0, it is a competence model which is commonly used in the
literature as a standard (Bushuyeva et al., 2018). The ICB (International Project Management
Association , IPMA) divides the individual competencies into three areas:
Perspective: “is the set of methods, tools, and techniques through which individuals interact
with the environment and the reason that leads people, organisations and societies to support
a project”.
People: “is the collection of required personal and interpersonal competencies to
successfully participate in or lead a project.”
Practice: “is a set of methods, tools, and techniques used in a project to realise its success.”

32 S.C.B. Sampaio et al.
According to Gardiner (2005), the people factor can be broken into hard and soft dimensions.
The soft dimension, or the elements known collectively as soft skills, is related to personal
and interpersonal competencies, such as communication and leadership. On the other
hand, the hard dimension, or the elements known collectively as hard skills, is related to
mechanical and technical activities, such as planning, estimation, and controlling.
Our study focuses on the behavioural aspects of SEs, so it will follow the definition
of (Gardiner, 2005) for soft skills, which is equivalent to the People area of the ICB
(International Project Management Association , IPMA). There are other terms used in
the literature as synonyms to soft skills, such as non-technical skills and social skills
(Papatheocharous et al., 2014; Gardiner, 2005). This paper will use the terms soft skills
and non-technical skills. With the rising importance of soft skills in Agile environments,
it is necessary to look into the literature to understand their relevance and meaning and to
analyse their impact on newborns SEs in a real-world context, such as we find at the PDP
in Recife, Brazil.
2.3 Related works
Bootla et al. (2015) collected a set of skills and attributes for Scrum development teams and
validated them with experts and practitioners. The skills and attributes were categorised into
three types: technical skills, people skills or SKs, and attitudes. They selected 38 important
skills and attributes, among which 16 are soft skills, and most of the experts and practitioners
agreed with all the proposed skills and attributes. Even though they had already selected
relevant SKs, the selection was validated by Thai experts, so these soft skills may differ in a
different culture. Matturro et al. (2015) selected relevant SKs for SEs in Uruguay, although
their focus was not on Agile environments.
Stevens and Norman (2016) also selected a set of key soft skills, due to the strong
demand for those skills in the job market in New Zealand’s capital city of Wellington. They
did it through an analysis of job advertisements, interviews, focus groups, and a survey.
However, just like (Bootla et al., 2015), it was done in a specific context. Many other
authors analysed the skills demanded by their local markets (Hiranrat and Harncharnchai,
2018; Papoutsoglou et al., 2017). Hiranrat and Harncharnchai (2018) used text mining to
discover skill demands from online job advertisements in Thailand. The most demanded
SKs are communication, problem solving, being a team player, speaking English, and being
analytical. Papoutsoglou et al. (2017) found learning, value, and problem-solving are the
most required SKs. A comparison of these two studies and ours confirms that different
countries required different skills, although it also shows the relevance of preparing new
engineers to fulfil job market demand.
Garousi et al. (2019) identified skills in the industry and synthesised evidence of the
knowledge deficiencies of graduating SE students. They showed the importance of SE
professional practice and SKs in general, the importance of certain SE activities, and skills
in SE education. Many studies refer to the need to improve soft skills in undergraduates
(Valentin et al., 2015; Heggen and Cody, 2018; Bastarrica et al., 2017; Emmanuel, 2016;
Patacsil and Tablatin, 2017; Noah and Aziz, 2020). Despite the lack of any Agile context,
these studies all encourage the generation of junior SEs with improved SKs.
Kovitz (2003) presented special skills that helped an Agile development team to deliver
as predicted, such as: breaking big things into smaller parts, communication (conversational
and writing skills), giving up control, test-driven practices, object oriented design, and
negotiation. According to the author, most of these skills are not currently taught in

Soft skills for newborn software engineers in agile teams 33
universities, which once again brings up the relevance of our work in allowing newborns
SEs to self-assess for some of these SKs. Heggen and Cody (2018) also stated that current
software engineering courses are not aligned with the needs of industry. The authors
presented a work program for students at Berea College, in which 22 students were employed
by the Computer Science Department to develop software over the course of one year.
However, it focused on the program itself not on the relevant skills for the millennium SEs,
or their ability to self-assess their skills.
Bushuyeva et al. (2018) proposed a model capable of identifying soft skills. The authors
used the ICB 4.0 (International Project Management Association , IPMA) to create a pattern.
Their model obtains information about non-technical skills and generates a graph comparing
the created pattern with the actual score of each soft skill. However, its focus is on IT project
management instead of on the SEs themselves.
Purao and Suen (2010) developed a multi-faceted metric that is also a way of assessing
an SE’s soft skills, but it is just an assessment method, it does not show how to improve the
SKs.
According to Khatri et al. (2019), the key Agile developers are flexibility, sensitivity
to change, a learning organisation, team work, competence, R&D and innovation, and
interfacing with suppliers and customers. These Agile developers are seen as organisational
characteristics. Although our research has a more individual lens and a different context,
the SKs prioritised in our work, are necessary precursors to developing those organisational
Agile developers. A similar organisational lens was adopted by Alkhoraif and McLaughlin
(2018), who presented a study on organisational culture frameworks that facilitate adopting
the Lean system. Among the organisational culture inhibitors to implementing Lean, the
study names lack of communication and teamwork, two SKs also found to be critical in our
study.
Matturro et al. (2019) published the results of a systematic mapping of SKs in software
engineering conducted up to December 2017. They presented 30 categories of SKs. In
their analysis, communication, teamwork, and analytical, organisational, and interpersonal
skills were the most cited skills. The authors showed a taxonomy for SKs within software
engineering. Our work differs from theirs by having a more narrowed look, focusing only
on software engineers within agile teams. Moreover, we present the results of a self-
assessment tool. As mentioned by Ahmed et al. (2015), we believe that SEs could benefit
from greater self-awareness and from others’ perspectives to develop their SKs, which in
turn can positively influence their work. Finally, as mentioned by Papatheocharous et al.
(2014), knowing the human factors of a team generally leads to a more productive and
satisfied team.
3 Methodology
Following a qualitative approach, Figure 2 is an overview of the research steps we describe
in the following sections.
3.1 Literature review
This study was carried out following Kitchenham and Charters’ guidelines on systematic
literature review, as explained by Kitchenham and Charters (2007), leading to a better
understanding of the research problem and to gathering the relevant non-technical skills for
SEs in an Agile environment.

34 S.C.B. Sampaio et al.
Figure 2 Research steps (see online version for colours)
This research protocol includes the strategies used for the retrieval and selection of studies
relevant to the research topic of interest (Kitchenham and Charters, 2007).
The literature review was conducted by a search string in five repositories of scientific
papers, as shown in Table 2. Besides Google Scholar, these were chosen because they
support
•advanced search using keywords
•filtering search results by publication area
•filtering by publication type
•exporting the search results in BibTex or CSV format.
The collected papers were analysed, first by their titles and keywords, then by their abstracts,
and then by their introductions. Finally, the selected set of papers was read in its entirety.
Table 2 Research sources
Source URL
IEEE Xplore Digital Library http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/
Springer Lin http://link.springer.com/
Science Direct http://www.sciencedirect.com/
ACM Digital Library http://dl.acm.org/
Google Scholar http://scholar.google.com
Initially, we used a search string with just the two main areas involved in our research,
“Agile Methodologies” and “Soft Skills”. Because these strings did not bring as many results
as we needed for the research, some synonyms were added separately for each research
area. First, we added synonyms for soft skills and the search string was tested. Then, the
same thing was done for Agile methodologies, followed by new tests. The next step was
to put both of them together in a single string, resulting in the following search string:
((“Soft Skill”) OR (“Behavioural Characteristics”) OR (“Behavioural Characteristics”)
OR (“Behavioural Competencies”) OR (“Behavioural Competencies” OR (“Behaviour
Competences”)) AND ((Agile) OR (Scrum) OR (“Extreme Programming”) OR (LEAN))
AND (“Software Engineer”).

Soft skills for newborn software engineers in agile teams 35
The inclusion criteria included:
•the publication year of the paper must be equal to or greater than 2001, which was
the publication year of the Agile Manifesto
•the paper must be written in English
•the paper must be published in a journal or peer-reviewed conference
•the paper must be directly related to the research questions
•the paper must cover the research topics, such as SKs for SEs.
Still following the inclusion criteria, we collected papers about specific definitions of
a few soft skills not found among the initial set of papers using a snowballing technique
(Wohlin, 2014). Paper (Nijhuis et al., 2018) (E3) was added during this step.
3.2 Elaborate and pilot test the survey
The survey was elaborated according to (Ciolkowski et al., 2003), with the objectives of:
•filtering the eight most prioritised SKs for SEs working within Agile teams in the
PDP in Recife
•identifying a target group for the instrument
•understanding initiatives that companies of the PDP are using to improve SEs’ SKs.
Regarding the context, PDP currently hosts 267 organisations in the fields of information
technology and communications, creative industries, and urban technologies. The park has
two business incubators, two business accelerators, two research institutions, and several
government agencies.
For those skills that were undefined at this point, the survey used the ICB
standard (International Project Management Association , IPMA), (International Project
Management Association , IPMA), and the taxonomy listed by Matturro et al. (2019). The
survey has three parts. The first part has four demographic questions. The second presents 26
statements related to SKs (two statements for each of 13 SKs), selected during the analysis
phase. The last part has 4 questions on how companies are investing in the SKs of their SEs.
Moreover, to evaluate these statements, we used a five-level Likert Scale, where 1 means
strongly disagree and 5 means strongly agree with a statement. Although the protocol was
validated by the researchers involved in this paper, it was still necessary to obtain feedback
from the target audience, new SEs. Therefore, five SEs, with ages between 20 and 25 years,
were invited to test the survey. All feedback was considered; some questions regarding the
company were excluded, and a few adjustments to the statements representing the definitions
of the SKs were necessary. The five responses were deleted after the test, and the final
version of the survey (https://bit.ly/sk-protocol) went live.
3.3 Analyse survey results
The survey was shared with SEs working in the PDP in Recife. It was sent with a message
briefly explaining the research and the target audience of the survey. Particular emphasis
was given to the fact that only SEs in Agile teams should answer the survey.

36 S.C.B. Sampaio et al.
The survey helped to identify the 8 most relevant SKs, according to the practitioners at
the PDP. We were also looking for the following aspects:
•understand who is the final public that the application would be developed for
•put in perspective what the companies from the PDP are doing to improve the SKs of
their SEs
•identify what SEs are expecting their companies to do to improve their SKs.
3.4 Develop the self-assessment instrument and collect practitioners’ feedback
This study aimed at developing an MVP of a self-assessment application capable of scoring
the relevant SKs of SEs and, based on the literature, pointing to improvements in each
non-technical skill. It should also help SEs to understand how they can improve their skills
and raise awareness in what non-technical skills are expected from them, especially in their
first-time jobs.
The development phase consisted of the elaboration of the instrument, listing its
requirements, the development itself, and a test period, to make sure that important
improvements would be made in the MVP before its deployment. The application was
developed using continuous delivery, meaning that at least once a week it was evaluated and
a functional and important part of the MVP was delivered. In the third week, the MVP was
considered ready for the final tests. For this last test phase, six SEs, with ages between 20 and
25 years, used the application and suggested improvements, which were then implemented
in the last version of the MVP (https://cmetric.io).
To collect practitioners’ feedback, the developed instrument went live, and it was shared
with practitioners. Among the people that used it, four SEs answered the questions, and
their feedback was collected and analysed in this work. These SE were all within the profile
of intended users, according to the results of the survey.
4 Results
The results present the SK catalogue and discusses the survey results, addressing the SKs
prioritised by the SEs at the PDP and how companies follow up concerning their SEs’ SKs,
and activities are undertaken to improve them.
4.1 Soft skills catalogue
The literature review presented dozens of SKs. Because considering all them in this study
would not be practical, in this catalogue, we decided to present the competencies that were
perceived and studied by most authors within Agile teams (2001–2019).
The steps we followed were:
1 removing duplicated skills
2 separate items describing more than one SK
3 combining the remaining SKs.

Soft skills for newborn software engineers in agile teams 37
Finally, the total number of 53 distinct SKs were found. The remaining 53 SKs were once
again grouped, and some generalisations were made, forming 13 SK categories. Many skills
with only one citation were not grouped, and therefore were not included in the catalogue.
Among these competences: Seeing the big picture, Methodic, Sense-Making, Work and
Task Planning, Information Seeking, Searching and Retrieval, Managing Power, Cultural
fit, and Diplomacy.
Each category presents related skills (i.e., communication involves communication,
presentation, oral presentation, and oral and written communication). The categories were
divided into two groups, personal skills (Table 3) and interpersonal skills (Table 4).
Table 3 SK catalogue for agile SEs: personal skills
SK Category Definition Related SK
Self-
management
Ability to manage yourself (Stevens and
Norman, 2016), regarding stress (Acuna et al.,
2006), time, and workload, and to take initiative
Self-control, Punctuality, Self-
management, Initiative, Self-
reflection, Time Management
Dealing
with Change
Ability to adapt easily to changes (International
Project Management Association , IPMA) and
to have a continuously open mind for it
Dealing with Change,
Tolerance of Ambiguity,
Open-mindedness
Eagerness to
Learn
Ability to be pro-active, positive, confident,
curious, and willing to learn (Stevens and
Norman, 2016)
Active Learning, Independent
learning, Eagerness to Learn,
Autonomy, Fast Learner
Problem
Solving
Ability to understand, articulate, and solve
complex problems (Ahmed et al., 2012) and
to apply existing technical skills to seek out
alternatives. Able to solve problems (Stevens
and Norman, 2016), and to apply various
techniques and ways of thinking to defining,
analysing, prioritising, finding alternatives for,
and dealing with or solving challenges and
problems (International Project Management
Association , IPMA)
Problem Solving,
Resourcefulness, Analytical,
Aptitude
Ethics Ability to cooperate with people of different
personalities, race, gender, etc. (Purao and Suen,
2010); acting in accordance with his or her
own moral and ethical values and principles
(International Project Management Association
, IPMA)
Reliable, Ethics
4.2 Survey results
This section will present the results from 63 SE respondents from the PDP. The responses
were collected in October 2019.
4.2.1 Demographics
Most of the respondents were male; only ten females responded to the questionnaire (15.9%).
Forty-two SEs, representing 66,7%, had already graduated. The same number of respondents

38 S.C.B. Sampaio et al.
were at the beginning of their careers, with a maximum of 5 years of experience, as shown
in Figure 3.
Therefore, the most common profile was a male graduate, in his first 5 years on the
job, fitting the profile pointed out by Fagerholm and Vihavainen (2013) and (Valentin et al.,
2015). Our respondents were all SEs working in Agile teams at the PDP.
Table 4 SK catalogue for agile SEs: interpersonal skills
SK Category Definition Related SK
Communication Ability to be clear, articulate and take the audience on
a journey (Stevens and Norman, 2016); being able to
establish a clear and effective communication flow
Communication,
Presentation,
Oral Presentation,
Oral and Written
Communication
Leadership Reaches decisions in cooperation with others (Purao
and Suen, 2010)
Influence and control,
Decision Making,
Critical Thinking
Teamwork Participates as an effective member of a team (Purao
and Suen, 2010), being able to work collaboratively in
a team project environment(Matturro et al., 2019)
Coordination,
Teamwork, Co-
operation, Team
Player
Negotiation Negotiates to arrive at a consensus or compromise
(Purao and Suen, 2010), to reach satisfactory
agreements with others using negotiation
techniques(International Project Management
Association , IPMA)
Negotiation
Conflict
Management
Handles conflict maturely (Purao and Suen, 2010) Conflict and Crisis
Management
Relationships Ability to build trust and relationships, remembering
names, adapt to talking with peers, seniors, and clients,
comfortable being yourself, respect for others (Stevens
and Norman, 2016)
Relationship,
Interpersonal
relationship,
Openness, Trust
Customer
Orientation
Ability to be client outcome-focused (Stevens and
Norman, 2016), to respond and anticipate clients’ or
customers’ goals (Purao and Suen, 2010); ability to
work closely with users and maintain positive user and
client relationships (Matturro et al., 2019)
Customer oriented,
Understand business
drivers, Customer
orientation
Engagement
and
Motivation
Influences team members directly and persuades others
to achieve excellence or take actions without using
authority(Nijhuis et al., 2018)
Relaxation, Self-
motivation, Motivate
self and others,
Motivation
4.2.2 Prioritised skills
To answer the research question “What are the most relevant soft skills for SEs working
within Agile teams in the Porto Digital Park in Brazil?”, an average of all marks given to

Soft skills for newborn software engineers in agile teams 39
the statements (two statements for each SK) was calculated. The results of this analysis are
shown in Figure 4. The equation for these analyses is
AverageMarkOfSof tSkill =∑F irstStatM ark +∑SecondStatMark
2(1)
A second analysis was carried out considering only the SEs with less than 5 years of
experience, as depicted in Figure 5.
Figure 3 Respondents professional experience
Figure 4 Soft skill average marks for all respondents
The overall results present negotiation, leadership, engagement and motivation, and
relationships as less important SKs for SEs in the PDP. Although, the less experienced SEs
prioritised self-management over conflict management. The reason for this might be related
to the seniority of the SEs, i.e., the longer the experience, the more the SE will be seen as a
leader in projects. As leaders, they will more likely face challenges that demand leadership,
negotiation skills, and the ability to motivate others.

40 S.C.B. Sampaio et al.
Figure 5 Soft skill average marks, considering only the less experienced SEs
To build the instrument, only the eight most important SKs, according to the rankings by
the 42 respondents with less than five years of experience, were considered. Based on
the results, the chosen skills for the MVP were: Communication, Customer Orientation,
Problem Solving, Teamwork, Ethics, Dealing with Change, Eagerness to Learn, and Self-
Management.
The prioritised SKs are consistent with many studies (Kovitz, 2003; Hiranrat and
Harncharnchai, 2018; Papoutsoglou et al., 2017), where communication, eagerness to learn,
problem solving, and customer orientation appear as the most wanted characteristics for SEs.
Openness to deal with change, self-management, and teamwork are necessary in an Agile
environment. Therefore, we believe that the instrument will help not only local newborn
SEs, but also SEs worldwide.
4.3 Initiatives to improve soft skills for SEs
Regarding the perceptible initiatives to improve SE’s SKs, 66.7% of the respondents said
that there are no activities with the objective of improving their non-technical skills inside
their companies, although 76,2% pointed out that their SKs were evaluated during their job
interviews. As presented in Figure 6, the numbers of improvement activities is almost the
inverse of the numbers demanding SKs during job interviews.
Even though there must be activities that SE respondents do not recognise as initiatives
to improve their skills, the number is still too low. Moreover, 92,9% of the respondents
affirmed that they would like to have activities to improve their SKs. Therefore, those who
responded “yes” to having improvement activities inside their companies, were asked to
exemplify these initiatives. Table 5 shows a list of these activities, brought by the SE, along
with its characteristics.

Soft skills for newborn software engineers in agile teams 41
Figure 6 Demand for SKs at job interviews compared to company activities to improve SKs
Table 5 Activities to improve SE SKs
Activities Characteristics
Assessments with Feedback Feedback focused on improving SKs.
Continuous feedback.
Formal and spontaneous feedback.
Workshops and Events Workshop focused on improving SKs.
Monthly workshops.
Team encourages the SE to create material and present to the
others.
Support SEs to participate in events of their interest
Mentorship Mentor SEs in particular tasks.
5 The self-assessment instrument
The goal of the instrument is that the SE will be doing a self-evaluation and receive a report
containing information about the assessed SKs. The MVP development started after the
first analysis of the survey. The public that would use it was identified, and the eight most
important SKs for this target group were determined. The main user stories (US) for the
MVP were:
•US001: As a software engineer, I must be briefly introduced to the tool to be able to
understand it before using it.
•US002: As a software engineer, I want to assess my own SKs with a user friendly
and accurate online scorecard.
•US003: As a software engineer I want to be able to visualise the results of my
self-evaluation in a radar graph to understand my weaknesses.
•US004: As a software engineer, I want to get a report with recommendations on how
to improve my SKs.
•US005: As a software engineer, I want to be able to download the results of my
self-evaluation in a PDF file to have it available offline.

42 S.C.B. Sampaio et al.
Due to the popularity of the JSON (Java Script Object Notation) format, a list of JSON
objects was created. These objects contain the name of the SK, its ID, marks, and a list of
statements. Each list item contains a statement ID, description, marks, and improvement
statement. For a better understanding, Figure 7 shows an example of the JSON object
explained above.
Figure 7 Example of JSON object used in the instrument (see online version for colours)
We used the Vuestic Template, because it uses Vue.js, a JavaScript framework, it provided a
responsive (adaptable to different sizes of screens) application, with an attractive design (to
stimulate SEs to use the application), that could be developed in the shortest period of time
possible. This template is provided under the MIT Licence, which allowed the authors to
change whatever was necessary for the application. The statements used to assess the SKs
and the improvement points were based on the literature review. Table 6 presents some of
the improvement statements, and the list below gives a few examples of the SK statements.

Soft skills for newborn software engineers in agile teams 43
•Communication:
•I am able to make myself clear inside the project (Stevens and Norman, 2016).
•I can accurately deliver information to all relevant parties inside the project
(International Project Management Association , IPMA).
•I see myself as an inclusive person, making sure that everyone understands
information, regardless of the level of knowledge of my team (Stevens and
Norman, 2016).
•I am able to exchange information consistently inside my project (International
Project Management Association , IPMA).
•I can clearly express myself inside the project with my written language
(Stevens and Norman, 2016).
•Teamwork:
•I respect the others in my project for what they can contribute (Stevens and
Norman, 2016).
•I am able to contribute to the success of my team without degrading
relationships (Stevens and Norman, 2016).
•I am able to resolve conflicts and contribute to team success without degrading
relationships (Stevens and Norman, 2016).
•I think that the relationship is an important aspect for the success of the project
(International Project Management Association , IPMA).
•I always adopt a sense of responsibility for the team and the project (Stevens
and Norman, 2016).
•Self-management:
•I am capable of completing a task on time (Stevens and Norman, 2016).
•I am never late in my schedule inside the project (Stevens and Norman, 2016).
•I am good at dealing with stressful situations (International Project Management
Association , IPMA).
•I am always ready to participate and offer my opinions while acknowledging
there is more to learn (Stevens and Norman, 2016).
•I am self-motivated (Stevens and Norman, 2016) and able of setting my
personal goals (International Project Management Association , IPMA).
The application was developed with an Agile mindset, being delivery-driven. Among the
implemented feedback were “Add a progress bar to give an idea of how much of the
evaluation form was covered” and “Change the colour of the radar graph to red, it will help
to make the people understand that it is important”.

44 S.C.B. Sampaio et al.
Table 6 Improvement statements per soft skill
Soft Skills Statement
Communication Try to be clearer when you write or speak inside the project.
You should manage to deliver information to all relevant parties inside the project.
Teamwork You should always respect the others in the project for what they can contribute
(Stevens and Norman, 2016).
Do not degrade relationships in order to contribute to the project. It will not help
the success of the project (Stevens and Norman, 2016).
Self-
management
Be self-motivated to complete a task in the given time (Stevens and Norman,
2016).
Be ready to participate (Stevens and Norman, 2016).
Dealing with
Change
You must adapt yourself easily to changes (International Project Management
Association , IPMA).
Always keep in mind the interests of your project (International Project
Management Association , IPMA).
Eagerness to
Learn
Be always willing to learn from your mistakes(Stevens and Norman, 2016), from
lessons learned, and from your teammates.
Be curious about learning new things inside the project (Stevens and Norman,
2016).
Customer
Orientation
Try to stimulate communication with your client to understand and meet customer
needs.
Be able to anticipate clients/customers’ goal and to keep in mind client outcome.
Problem
Solving
Always use your technical skills to seek out alternatives to solve problem (Stevens
and Norman, 2016).
You should be good at interpreting requirements (Stevens and Norman, 2016).
Ethics Regardless of the seniority of your team members, you should treat them equally
(Stevens and Norman, 2016).
Try to understand your personal and professional freedoms and limits
(International Project Management Association , IPMA).
The Welcome screen contains a brief text about the application and how it works. It is shown
in Figure 8. Clicking on the button “BEGIN YOUR BEHAVIOUR EVALUATION”, the SE
will start the eight-part self-assessment, with one part for each SK, and each part containing
five statements. For each one of the statements the SE must select one of five options as an
answer: Strongly Agree (5), Agree (4), Neutral (3), Disagree (2), or Strongly Disagree (1).
If the SE chooses Strongly Disagree, the application will give a mark of 1 to the statement;
if the SE chooses Disagree, it will give a mark of 2, and so on up to Strongly Agree, with a
mark of 5.
The mark of the SK is given by the number of statements that were marked as 4 or 5,
which means that the SE has the characteristics indicated by the statement. As there are
eight SKs with five statements each, their marks will be shown on a radar graph which has
the shape of an octagon.
As seen in Figures 9 and 11, the radar graph has 8 axes, one for each SK, and its range
goes from 0, which is the centre of the octagon, to 5, which is the external edge of the
octagon. The closer to the zero, the weaker are the abilities related to that SK. Moreover,
the part of the graph which indicates the mark of a specific SK is painted red and shows the
name of the respective SK, giving the SE a visual overview of his or her result.

Soft skills for newborn software engineers in agile teams 45
Figure 8 Welcome screen for mobile devices
By completing the self-assessment, the SE can generate an Evaluation Report. It presents
the radar graph containing the marks for every SK and a list of improvement points for each
statement not marked as 4 or 5 (strongly agree or agree), grouped by SK. The improvement
opportunities are sorted from the SK with the lowest mark to the one with the highest mark.
5.1 Feedback from Practitioners
Some questions were defined to receive feedback from the SEs, listed in Table 7. After
receiving the feedback, its was necessary to analyse the answers to understand the relevance
of this instrument for the career of an SE and check whether it would help to reduce the
existing SK gap.
Table 7 Evaluation questions
ID Question
Q1 How can this instrument be improved to help SEs to better understand their SKs?
Q2 What is the relevance of this instrument for an SE at the beginning of his or her career?
Q3 Would you use or recommend this kind of instrument for SEs at the beginning
of their careers?
The link to the application and the questions from Table 7 were shared with some SEs in
the target group. Those involved with the feedback were also asked to send their Evaluation
Reports. The graphs generated by SE1 and SE2 are shown in Figure 9 and 11. The
corresponding lists of their improvement opportunities are presented in Figure 10 and 12,
respectively.
The feedback for the questions on Table 7 is shown on the list in Table 8.

46 S.C.B. Sampaio et al.
Figure 9 Radar graph of SE1 (see online version for colours)
Figure 10 Improvements for SE1
Figure 11 Radar graph of SE2 (see online version for colours)

Soft skills for newborn software engineers in agile teams 47
The feedback received on the first question points to improvement opportunities, such as:
improve usability and improve the statements to fit better with SEs’ daily routines. The
answers to the second question show that the instrument is relevant for the career of an
SE, especially those starting the career, exactly the group pointed out by the survey results.
Finally, all practitioners said that they would use and recommend the application. Showing
the necessity for SEs to understand their SKs from the beginning of the career.
Table 8 Feedback
Question Response
1 Before the test, present the definition of the Soft Skills that will be assessed (SE1).
I do not really see any necessary improvement. The instrument is capable of doing
what was proposed (SE2).
For a Software Engineer would be easier to answer the questions if they were more
related to their daily routine (SE3).
Improve usability and also make a deeper analysis on the Soft Skills (SE4).
2 It is very important because it shows improvement points. It is missing just the
information about how to improve these Soft Skills (SE1).
This instrument is extremely important for SE at the beginning of the career because it
will help them to understand what is their professional profile, learning their weakness
and strengths and the most important soft skills. Therefore, it will have better behaviour
inside of a company, as well as find jobs that suit them better (SE2).
I believe that the instrument can help the SE on personal development, especially those
who just graduated or those who are inexperienced (SE3).
Very important. The job market is no longer looking for a technically perfect person,
but a person who has good Soft Skill, like leadership, proactive, etc (SE4).
3 Absolutely. It is very important that the SE does not focus just on Hard Skills but they
should also try to improve the behavioural aspects. This kind of instrument should be
used inside the companies during the performance assessment process (SE1).
I would, for sure, use and recommend it. Because it is extremely necessary to know
your main skills since the beginning of your career (SE2).
Yes, because the majority of the other existing instruments are paid and the free ones
do not show many details. It is a great MVP to understand the behavioural profile of
who is answering the test (SE3).
I believe that the Soft Skills already are and will continue being a requirement for
the most opportunities in the job market because there are a lot of problems in the
execution of the project when the people involved do not develop some Soft Skills,
like communication and problem-solving.
I would use and would recommend as a supporting tool for interns who had just entered
the IT job market (SE4).
In conclusion, it was possible to see the necessity that the practitioners have of understanding
their SKs, and it is so important that they said they would recommend it, especially for SEs
that have just entered the IT job market. Therefore, the instrument we developed is a good
MVP to help SEs, and it is also useful in helping to reduce the existing SK gap in the IT
job market.

48 S.C.B. Sampaio et al.
Figure 12 Improvements for SE2
6 Conclusions, limitations, and future work
Around the world, research on job advertisements shows a demand for software developers
with strong SKs, such as communication skills, ability to work in teams, and problem-
solving skills (Hiranrat and Harncharnchai, 2018; Papoutsoglou et al., 2017; Stevens and
Norman, 2016). Many studies also show an urgent need to improve the undergraduate
computer science curriculum (Kovitz, 2003; Heggen and Cody, 2018) to include SKs. There
is a gap between the SKs companies need and the SKs developers have (Fagerholm and
Vihavainen, 2013; Valentin et al., 2015), especially when they are new.
The present work had the objective of creating an instrument for the diagnosis of SEs’
SKs within Agile teams, in the PDP in Recife, Brazil. In reaching this goal, this project also
raised awareness of the relevance of SKs for SEs. However, even though the companies
of the PDP are starting to understand the relevance of SKs, there still are not enough
activities to monitor and improve an SE’s SKs, and the existent ones are not aligned with
the expectations of the SEs.
In this context, we created an SK catalogue, containing the 13 most mentioned SKs for
SEs in the literature. The catalogue presents the skills, their synonyms, and their definitions.
It contributes to the small number of peer-reviewed studies that describe and define SKs.
Many studies mention the demand for SKs in job adverts or interviews, without mentioning
what they are and how practitioners can improve them. We developed and evaluated a
self-assessment MVP that analyses the SK strengths and weakness of SEs and gives a few
recommendations based on its evaluation.
Our study also shows an overview of a real-world scenario using companies in the
PDP, evaluating the relevance of SKs for these companies and for their SEs. Although
local software organisations assess the SEs’ SKs during interviews, they most likely do
not invest as much in soft skills as in technical skills after hiring. And finally, for those
junior practitioners who used the instrument, some knowledge and appreciation were gained
regarding SKs and their own limitations.
Based on this work’s results, it was possible to see the relevance of SKs for the SEs,
being one of the most important aspects within Agile teams for a project’s success. Among
the thirteen SKs, leadership, negotiation, and engagement and motivation turned out to
be less important for the respondents. Communication, on the other hand, was the most
important, according to the SEs from the PDP. There is a minor difference for those more
experienced SEs, where conflict management is more relevant than self-management. The
developed instrument could particularly help newborn SEs to know their behavioural profile

Soft skills for newborn software engineers in agile teams 49
in the area that they are about to start working in, preventing misbehaviour problems and
helping them understand exactly what needs to be improved.
The catalogue and the instrument may help young SEs to enrich their knowledge and
improve their SKs. The results may be also used by universities to consider designing
courses for improving students’ skills to meet software industry demands. It can be also used
by Agile software development companies to develop training programs and activities or to
assess and monitor the SKs of their interns and young SEs. Finally, the research community
may find useful insights in both the catalogue and self-assessment instrument.
6.1 Limitations and future works
The results obtained by this study are limited by the regional perspective where the research
was conducted. Moreover, the sample size of the SEs who participated in the research is
not enough to allow generalisations about real scenarios of relevant SKs for SEs in Agile
teams. Another limitation is the completeness of the SK catalogue, because there are dozens
of SKs that can be considered.
One of the threats to the validity of this work is the possibility of a study that was not
found by our literature review; the instrument and the entire study could be missing relevant
skills. Besides, the survey used only two statements for each SK. Two statements might not
be enough to describe each SK adequately.
In this context, it is possible to highlight the following possibilities for future work:
•Conduct a wider search on SKs and try to map more details about the skills,
enriching the catalogue.
•Develop a quantitative study to get a sense of the SKs relevant for newborn SEs.
Consider SEs working in other parts of the world to understand whether the SKs
change according to regional characteristics, such as the culture.
•Turn the MVP instrument into a product, adding the practitioners’ suggestions as
improvements, and implementing a complete version of the instrument.
•Develop a study focused on the activities to improve SKs, checking whether they are
aligned with the expectations of SEs, and on how to improve these activities.
•Conduct a study to understand whether the SKs of an SE working on local Agile
teams is the same as for SEs working on global Agile teams.
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