This work in progress innovative practice paper describes a preliminary framework for fostering leadership skills in software engineering students. The software industry is an environment of uncertainty, volatility and constant change. This has shaped the industry components and actors, generating methodologies that are able to cope with market expectations and software development requirements. Among these, agile is the most adopted. Professionals that possess skills to work in these agile teams, often named “soft skills”, are challenging for universities to teach. From these skills, leadership, in particular, is a soft skill that has recently been studied by the software engineering education community but remains as an open research topic. A teaching methodology that demonstrated positive outcomes is active learning, as it centers the students in the process, enhances motivation and provides a collaborative approach for learning. In this context, this work aims at proposing a framework to train students to possess leadership skills using challenge based learning. To achieve this goal, we propose a preliminary framework to be used when teaching leadership skills to software engineering students in active learning environments. Our results provide indicatives that the framework could be effective at fostering shared leadership, with the proposed role rotation during the development cycle, but it also presents challenges in the process of generating guiding questions for learning as the process does not seem clear from the perspective of the experts.

Defining and designing a software product is not merely a technical endeavor, but also a socio-technical journey. As such, its success is associated with human-related aspects, such as the value users perceive. To handle this issue, the product manager role has become more evident in software-intensive companies. A unique, challenging context for these professionals is constituted by software startups, emerging companies developing novel solutions looking for sustainable and scalable business models. This study aims to describe the role of product managers in the context of software startups. We performed a Socio-Technical Grounded Theory study using data from blog posts and interviews. The results describe the product manager as a multidisciplinary, general role, not only guiding the product by developing its vision but also as a connector that emerges in a growing company, enabling communication of software development with other areas, mainly business and user experience. The professional performing this role has a background in one of these areas but a broad knowledge and understanding of key concepts of the other areas is needed. We also describe how differences of this role to other lead roles are perceived in practice. Our findings represent several implications for research, such as better understanding of the role transformation in growing software startups, practice, e.g., identifying the points to which a professional migrating to this role should pay attention, and the education of future software developers, by suggesting the inclusion of related topics in the education and training of future software engineers.

Context The COVID‐19 pandemic has had a disruptive impact on how people work and collaborate across all global economic sectors, including software business. While remote working is not new for software engineers, forced WFH situations come with both limitations and opportunities. As the ‘new normal’ for working might be based on the current state of Work‐from‐home (WFH), it is useful to understand what has happened and learn from that. Objective This study aims to gain insights into how their WFH arrangement impacts project management and software engineering. We are also interested in exploring these impacts in different contexts, such as startups and established companies. Method We conducted a global‐scale, cross‐sectional survey during the spring and summer 2021. Our results are based on quantitative and qualitative analysis of 297 valid responses. Results We characterize the profile of WFH in both spatial and temporal aspects, together with a set of common collaborative tools and coordination and control mechanisms. We revealed some areas of project management that are relatively more challenging during WFH situations, such as coordination, communication and project planning. We also revealed a mixed picture of the perceived impact of WFH on different software engineering activities. Conclusion WFH is a situational phenomenon which can have both negative and positive impact on software teams. For practitioners, we suggest a unified approach to consider the context of WFH, collaborative tools, associated coordination and control approaches and a process that resolve those aspects that are sensitive to physical interaction.

Teaching software engineering is challenging as it is a field widely desired by the market, and it requires professionals with an increasing set of skills. There are gaps in this learning process perceived both by professionals from the academia and from the industry that need to be further investigated in order to find strategies to reconcile the expectations from both environments. In this sense, this study aims to investigate these gaps from the perspective of Information Technology (IT) team leaders. In order to do so, we chose a qualitative approach to absorb as much knowledge as possible from each interviewed leader by using a field study methodology. Among the results obtained, we identified the appropriate profile to become an IT leader, what IT leaders expect regarding the skills of IT novices, and how the academia and the industry could work together to build an environment that better prepares these professional, according to the view of the interviewed leaders.

Software development practices to enhance software quality and help teams better develop collaboratively have received attention by the academic community.Among these techniques is Behavior-Driven Development (BDD), a development approach which proposes software to be developed focusing primarily on its expected behavior.Teaching-wise, introducing BDD on software engineering classes and/or training courses for software developers has become important.In this context, this study presents a body of knowledge on the impacts of teaching BDD in active learning environments (ALE).To achieve this, we have triangulated data from four data sources: (i) a systematic literature review; (ii) an expert panel with active-learning experts, (iii) a survey with participants in a software development course which teaches through active learning, and (iv) a case study on the effects of teaching and using BDD in an ALE.This study results are (i) the-state-of-the-art literature on this topic, (ii) an assessment of benefits and challenges of BDD in ALEs, and (iii) a set of best practices when teaching BDD in ALEs.We concluded that BDD has more positive than negative outcomes and we present a body of knowledge regarding BDD in ALEs.

The goal of this ongoing study is to understand how the development of soft skills is approached in the existing computer science and software engineering curricula.Based on the findings and improvement opportunities, we propose a high-level course structure to be used as a framework for those higher education organizations who want to support the development of students technical and non-technical skills.With this proposal, we believe computer science and software engineering students would be better prepared for the most recent IT market requirements, fostering the development of the 21st century's main competencies.In order to develop the course structure presented in this study, we conducted a literature research, which showed the development of students' soft skills still requires improvement and more efficient approaches.Our solution proposal combines DevOps, Scrum and Challenge Based Learning approaches into one single course, which uses Agile DevOps culture and values, along with continuous feedback, to promote students' soft skills development.

Developing soft skills as well as other non-technical issues is essential for a successful career in software engineering. Educators, practitioners and researchers are paying more attention to this matter as they understand its importance to a software development context. Even the IEEE/ACM software engineering guidelines has already pointed out the importance of working with real-world projects in order to develop such skills. Being technically competent is not enough; students should have opportunities to go beyond coding and experience interactions with real users in order to better prepare themselves for their future. In this sense, this paper presents a software engineering undergraduate program that connects students with real projects throughout its curriculum. In order to evaluate whether this program helps students into understanding the importance of connecting and interacting with real stakeholders, we performed a survey with 111 students from this program. Our results indicate that providing a structure throughout the program in which students actually work on real projects is beneficial for their soft skills development.

Business Model Canvas (BMC) is a tool widely used to describe startup business models. Despite the various business aspects described, BMC pays a little emphasis on team- related factors. The importance of team-related factors in software development has been acknowledged widely in literature. While not as extensively studied, the importance of teams in software startups is also known in both literature and among practitioners. In this paper, we propose potential changes to BMC to have the tool better reflect the importance of the team, especially in a software startup environment. Based on a literature review, we identify various components related to the team, which we then further support with empirical data. We do so by means of a qualitative case study of five startups.

The Lean Startup methodology disseminated the concept of MVP. Since then, the term has been used in several contexts aside startups with a blur definition. Practitioners name several artifacts as MVPs, such as prototypes or initial versions of a new product, rather than an instrument for experimentation. Given the importance of experimentation to the success rate of software startups, it is essential to understand if the experimentation element is still present in practitioners' understanding of the term and how they applied MVPs. To achieve this objective, we performed a survey with practitioners and coded their answers according to aspects found in a systematic mapping study on MVP. Our results indicate that MVP is mostly associated with the ideas of a product version and customer value rather than hypothesis testing and learning processes. Additionally, those respondents that focused on the first related group of terms did not give experiments as examples of MVP. In contrast, the opposite happened to those that used the second group.

The need of skills other than technical from software developers is becoming evident. The DevOps movement is an example of that applied to operational tasks. Startup development methodologies focus on business activities in innovative organizations. Several universities offer courses based on these methodologies to software engineering students, mainly to improve their creativity, problem solving, and business skills. This paper investigates how software engineering students learned startup development methodologies and discusses what are the challenges and benefits in their learning process. We conducted a multi-method study in three different universities. The data was collected in two phases and analyzed using thematic analysis. Our study reveals that students realized the importance of collaboration with other courses and the importance of user involvement in development. However, students tend to over-simplify concepts, trying to adapt them to what they are familiar with. The results indicate the necessity of business education for technical students and directions for improvements.

This study aims to characterize the state-of-the-art of the software startup education by analyzing and identifying best practices, opportunities and gaps on this field. To do so, we conducted a systematic mapping study in order to analyze and evaluate studies on software startup education. As a result, we found 31 publications in this process. These studies were classified into four categories: real projects, multidiscipline, environment and teaching. We concluded that research on software startup education is still scarce. Furthermore, there are several gaps and opportunities to be explored in future works. One of them is the difficulty in providing a real world experience in a educational setting. Successful cases reported combine three major components: real world projects, the right environment and a multidisciplinary context.

The advances in technology have enabled people to develop services and products that can reach millions of people around the world. Facebook and Google are examples of successful startups. However, most startups fail in their first years of life. From an education standpoint, even though universities are adapting their curriculums in order to embrace startup education content, the challenge still remains: how can we provide real world experiences for students to build relevant startups? In order to fill this gap, this paper introduces the Challenge Based Startup Learning, a framework that combines the Challenge Based Learning methodology with Lean Startup and Customer Development concepts, supported by software development techniques. We have applied and evaluated the framework in an undergraduate digital entrepreneurship course. Our preliminary results indicate that students not only understood what it takes to run a real startup, but they also felt engaged and empowered by delivering a useful and meaningful software.

Training students on mobile application development inherits the challenges of teaching software engineering where the target computer is a device that has a large number of features accessible by software.Furthermore, the most related experience in teaching students reveals difficulties in developing software engineering competencies.In this paper we present results from an iOS course held in a smart learning environment that adopted the Challenge Based Learning framework as the teaching methodology.Our results indicate that combining an active methodology along with an engaging environment can foster and improve software development learning.

Context:Software startups are increasingly seen as opportunities in a varieties of areas; from simple applications, as personal controls, to complex solutions, involving artificial intelligence or using big data.The process of developing these solutions happens quickly and in abbreviated form.Thus, software engineering should be adapted to better understand this world of software startups in a way to assist them in their customer discovery challenges and in the search for scalable business models.Main Goal: Understand the factors that positively and negatively influence the software development of software startups and present solutions found in an empirical study on startups located in an innovation ecosystem Methodology: We conducted interviews and observations as data collection techniques in eight software startups located at a Tech Park.