How Practitioners Perceive Coding ProficiencyTechnical TrackIndustry Program
Coding proficiency is essential to software practitioners. Unfortunately, our understanding on coding proficiency often translates to vague stereotypes, e.g., ``able to write good code''. The lack of specificity hinders employers from measuring a software engineer’s coding proficiency, and software engineers from improving their coding proficiency skills. This raises an important question: what skills matter to improve one’s coding proficiency. To answer this question, we perform an empirical study by surveying 340 software practitioners from 33 countries across 5 continents. We first identify 38 coding proficiency skills grouped into nine categories by interviewing 15 developers from three companies. We then ask our survey respondents to rate the level of importance for these skills, and provide rationales of their ratings. Our study highlights a total of 21 important skills that receive an average rating of 4.0 and above (important and very important), along with rationales given by proponents and dissenters. We discuss implications of our findings to researchers, educators, and practitioners.
Fri 31 May
14:00 - 15:30: Papers - Human Factors at Centre-Ville Chair(s): Christoph TreudeThe University of Adelaide | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
14:00 - 14:20 Talk | Xin XiaMonash University, Zhiyuan WanZhejiang University, Pavneet Singh KochharMicrosoft, David LoSingapore Management University | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
14:20 - 14:40 Talk | Farhana Sarker, Bogdan VasilescuCarnegie Mellon University, Kelly BlincoeUniversity of Auckland, Vladimir FilkovUniversity of California at Davis, USA Pre-print | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
14:40 - 15:00 Talk | Ann BarcombFriedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nurnberg and Lero - The Irish Software Research Centre and University of Limerick, Klaas-Jan StolUniversity College Cork and Lero, Ireland, Dirk Riehle, Brian FitzgeraldLero - The Irish Software Research Centre and University of Limerick Pre-print | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
15:00 - 15:10 Talk | Ann BarcombFriedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nurnberg and Lero - The Irish Software Research Centre and University of Limerick, Andreas KaufmannFriedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Dirk Riehle, Klaas-Jan StolUniversity College Cork and Lero, Ireland, Brian FitzgeraldLero - The Irish Software Research Centre and University of Limerick DOI Pre-print | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
15:10 - 15:20 Talk | Discovering Community Patterns in Open-Source: A Systematic Approach and Its EvaluationJournal-First Damian Andrew TamburriTU/e, Fabio Palomba University of Zurich, Alexander SerebrenikEindhoven University of Technology, Andy ZaidmanTU Delft Pre-print | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
15:20 - 15:30 Talk |