Soft skills do programador de software: abordagem conceitual e definição de métricas para identificação automática no contexto de um sistema de juiz online

Abstract

Soft skills are characteristics associated with an individual’s personality. They are relevant to professional qualification because they improve the performance at work. Since they are important, Information Technology companies need to understand the soft skills to each role in software development process. Additionally, during the hiring process these companies need to identify soft skills in candidates to find out which one of them have the required characteristics to fit the available jobs. However, soft skills identification is a hard task because it takes time to know an individual’s behavior and normally uses interviews or recommendations. Therefore, we notice a lack of automatic approaches in this context. This dissertation proposes a strategy to minimize the problem of soft skills identification. The strategy focus on the role of software programmers and it aims to find ways to automatically identify soft skills of individuals in this role. To do so, we propose a set of metrics that evaluate soft skills. We collect the metrics from an online judge system, according to its users’ performance and activities. To evaluate the metrics, we conduct an empirical study regarding 56 students of programming courses. Our results indicate that the metrics to identify Analytical and solving problems skills, Attention to details, Fast learning and Persistence are satisfactory. On the other hand, Communication and Work independently skills did not reach significant results.