Context Possessing up-to-date knowledge, skills and transversal competencies (KSTs) is essential for both the successful delivery of software projects and a career in software engineering (SE). However, the technological landscape is changing rapidly, posing continuous challenges: for professionals entering the market or pivoting careers, for organizations hiring and monitoring workforce expertise and for educational institutes designing or updating their curricula. Objectives We study job requirements within and across SE occupations (Applications Programmers, Software Developers, Systems Analysts, Web and Multimedia Developers) to assist software organizations to better face skill mismatch and skills’ gap problems, software engineers in upskilling and reskilling endeavors and software education institutes in providing more industrially relevant curricula. Method In this study, we leverage a large corpus of online job advertisements, which are jointly collected by CEDEFOP and Eurostat. The dataset is analyzed through the lens of concepts and techniques from the study of biodiversity of species to assess the variation of expertise and identify skills that are transferable or unique in these occupations. Specifically, we adopt established diversity indices, such as alpha diversity, beta diversity, ordination methods, and indicator species analysis, aiming to quantify both the variety of skills within occupations and the differences across them. This approach highlights both the breadth and distinctiveness of expertise across occupations, rendering the biodiversity perspective a central and practical part of our methodology. Results The results reveal that the complete list of KSTs that is used to characterize the profiles of OJAs for SE-related occupations is very broad and that skillset required for each occupation is quite distinct, since there are statistically significant differences in the composition of the skillsets. Transversal Skills and Competences (T) appear to be the most transferable qualification; or “adapt to change” and “work in teams” are the KSTs that appears more uniformly to all studied software occupations, and “computer programming” is the top hard-skill that appears more uniformly to all occupations. However, each occupation shows some specific qualifications. Conclusion The results are contrasted against the literature, are interpreted, various implications to researchers and practitioners are provided, and a retrospective analysis of the tailoring of the biodiversity approach to SE labor landscape is provided. Overall, the proposed biodiversity analysis adds value by providing a novel, theory-driven methodology to assess skill variation, identifying both common and occupation-specific KSTs, and supporting evidence-based workforce and curriculum design.

Software artifacts and source code are often viewed as pure technical constructs aiming primarily at delivering specific functionality to the end users. However, almost each line of a computer program is the result of software engineer’s craftsmanship and thus reflects their skills and capabilities, but also their aesthetic view of how code should be written. Additionally, by nature, the code is not an artifact that is managed by a single person: the code is peer-reviewed, in some cases programmed in pairs, or maintained by different people. In this respect, the first impression for the quality of a code is usually a matter of “ reading ” the “ beauty ” of the code and then diving into the details of the actual implementation. This “ first-look ” impression can psychologically bias the software engineers, either positively or negatively and affect their evaluation. In this article we propose a novel code beauty model (accompanied with metrics) and empirically explore: (a) if different software engineers perceive code beauty in the same way; (b) if the proposed code beauty metrics are correlated to the perceived code beauty by individual software engineers; and (c) if code beauty metrics are correlated to software maintainability. The results of the study suggest: (a) that code beauty is highly subjective and different software engineers perceive a code chunk as beautiful or not in an inconsistent way; (b) that some code beauty metrics can be considered as correlated to maintainability; and therefore, the “ first-look ” impression might to some extent be representative of the quality of the reviewed code chunk.

In recent years, the game industry has experienced significant growth from both a financial and a social viewpoint. Developing compelling games that rely on novel content is a challenge for 3-D firms, especially in terms of meeting the diverse expectations of end users. Game development is performed by multidisciplinary teams of professionals, in which game/level designers play a crucial role. Inevitably, they often depend on programmers for technical implementations creating bottlenecks, even for prototyping purposes. This issue has raised the need for introducing efficient low-code environments that empower individuals without programming expertise to develop 3-D games. This work introduces Codeless3D, a prototype for low-code 3-D game creation by nonprogrammers. The proposed approach and the tool aim to reduce design and development time, bridging the gap between conceptualization and production. To evaluate the usefulness of Codeless3D, in terms of usability and its vision, an evaluation study was conducted. The findings suggested that Codeless3D effectively reduces design and development time for stakeholders in the game development field. Overall, this article contributes to the emerging trend of low-code tools in the entertainment domain and offers insights for further improvements in game design and development processes.

As society is continuously adapting to technological change and progress, fast-moving digital transformations are the driving force for setting the necessary skillsets for the workforce. Furthermore, the advent of Industry 5.0 as a defining concept for the future, which advocates a human-centric coalescence of humans and technology or software, renders the skilled workforce the most important asset in any organization or business. The endgame of the digital transformation is to evoke the reshaping, evolution, or replacement of traditional and possibly obsolete processes at intra- or inter-organizational levels in multiple aspects, introducing innovative ways of re-defining the workforce. In this context SKILLAB will act as a smart tool for handling, honing, and widening the competencies of the personnel of companies, forecasting future skill gaps and providing European citizens with a tool for upskilling and reskilling.

Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) have become a standard for developing software applications, including but not limited to cloud-based ones and enterprise systems. When using SOA, software engineers organize the desired functionality into self-contained and independent services that are invoked through end-points (with API calls). The use of this emerging technology has changed drastically the way that software reuse is performed, in the sense that a “ service ” is a “ code chunk ” that is reusable (preferably in a black-box manner), but in many (especially “ in-house ”) cases, white-box reuse is also meaningful. To confront the reuse challenges opened-up by the rise of SOA, in the SmartCLIDE project 1 we have developed a framework (a methodology and a platform) to aid software engineers in systematic and more efficient (in terms of time, quality, defects, and process) reuse of services, when developing SOA-based cloud applications. In this work, we: (a) present the SmartCLIDE methodology and the Eclipse Open SmartCLIDE platform; and (b) evaluate the usefulness of the framework, in terms of relevance, usability, and obtained benefits. The results of the study have confirmed the relevance and rigor of the framework, unveiled some limitations, and pointed to interesting future work directions, but also provided some actionable implications for researchers and practitioners.

Abstract Game mechanics are high‐level descriptions of common game requirements; however, they do not provide any guidance on their code implementation. Nevertheless, their implementation involves high volumes of essential complexity, which in turn leads to the introduction of accidental complexity (long methods, code repetition, etc.). A possible solution to this problem is to map game mechanics to design patterns, in order to provide template instantiations that handle structural complexity. The aim of this study is twofold: (a) introduce template instantiations of game mechanics with Gang of Four (GoF) patterns and (b) evaluate such mappings in terms of extendibility and reusability. To achieve these objectives, we developed an online repository of mappings between GoF patterns and game mechanics and conducted an experiment to explore the benefits of the mapping. The results of the study suggest that the implementation of game mechanics with GoF patterns is beneficial, because the time to extent the current implementation or reuse code chunks is not prolonged, whereas the implementations are less faulty. Finally, the suggested mapping will equip game mechanics with sample implementations (that adhere to good design principles—ensuring extendibility) that can be reused, acting as a starting point for source code development.

This paper presents the design, implementation and educational use of a virtual learning environment which supports children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) to learn to solve social problems presented in the format of Social Stories. The pilot evaluation revealed that the environment has the potential to be a beneficial and easy-to-use educational tool for teaching social problem solving to children with ASD.