Practicing Soft Skills in Software Engineering
Autoren: Yvonne Sedelmaier, Dieter Landes
Practicing Soft Skills in Software Engineering. In: Liguo Yu (Hg.): Overcoming Challenges in Software Engineering Education: IGI Global, S. 161–179.
Abstract- Software Engineering requires a specific profile of technical expertise combined with context-sensitive soft skills. Therefore, university education in software engineering should foster both technical knowledge and soft skills. Students should be enabled to cope with complex situations in real life by applying and combining their theoretical knowledge with team and communication competencies. In this chapter, we report findings from a software engineering project course. We argue that project work is a suitable approach to foster soft skills. To that end, we provide justification from a pedagogical point of view, setting project-based learning into relation to action-orientated didactics. As teaching goals, we focus on experiencing a complete development project from end to end, following a software process model that needs to be adapted to the specific situation, self-determined planning and acting, including the organization of the project, team work and team communication, and self-reflection on individual roles and contributions and on the performance of the project team as a whole. In order to achieve these goals, we form teams of bachelor students which are headed by one master student each. It turned out that a clear separation of roles is inevitable within the team, but also with respect to instructors. Self-reflection processes concerning the team roles and the individual competencies are explicitly stimulated and cumulate in individual self-reports and post-mortem analysis sessions. We share findings of how well our approaches have worked and outline some ideas to improve things.
