Essay: Essential Technical Skills For Software Developers: A Comprehensive Guide.

Key Technical Skills for Software Developers

Discuss about the Systematic Review Of Productivity Factors Software.

In order to be a successful software developer and attain a significant carrier growth, the following skills are must for every job aspirant looking forward for a successful carrier in the software development domain. These skills have been identified after analyzing the job description profiles thoroughly.

Followings are the key technical skills for the software developers:

There are certain standards, applicable to the software domain, that a successful software engineer should be aware of. These standards include basics like proper utilization of version control system so that old work or codes can be retrieved whenever needed, no matter when the version of the code was created (1).  The professional should also be aware of various robust testing protocols on which the code is employed (2).

According to the industry experts, the act of writing code is not only about the science and technology put forward, it is also about the art that the professionals should master with the knowledge of the industry’s best practices and proper experience (3).

Due to the complexity and variety of project that the industry deals with, knowledge of any single programming language is not enough. The candidates must be comfortable in working with various coding languages. Otherwise, it is very difficult to excel in the domain (4) . Many software engineers prefer to master any important language and become expertise in that domain. It is completely fine to build an area of expertise, but several domains should be explored to remain in the field that is highly competitive and challenging as well.

Here are the top programming languages currently in demand, arranged as per the popularity from highest to lowest (5):

1. Java
2. Python
3. JavaScript
4. C++
5. C#
6. PHP
7. Perl

Apart from those top seven languages, some honorable mentions include:

• Swift
• R
• Rust

Additionally, knowledge in some key software frameworks like SQL, .NET, NODE is also very important and plays a vital role in providing an extra edge over the competitors.

Most of the times the projects need to be submitted within deadline and the professionals must be well prepared for that to work effectively (6).

The software development projects are often executed in team and having the ability to work in the team is must for the professionals (7).

The professionals should be always open to learn new things whenever the project demands for some new skill previously unexplored by the individuals (8).

Software developers often face situations where they need to analyze the possible solution and choose the appropriate one, which can only be done through proper critical reasoning (9). This particular soft skill is often regarded as the most important of all. 

Reference list:

1  Wagner, S. and Ruhe, M., 2018. A systematic review of productivity factors in software development. arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.06475.

2  Sonmez, J.Z., 2015. Soft Skills: The software developer's life manual. Manning Publ..

3  Knuth, D.E., 2016. The Art of Computer Programming, Combinatorial Algorithms: Part 2 (???. Volume 4,). ???????? ?? https://www. cs. utsa. edu/~ wagner/knuth/fasc5b2016, 5.

4  Liebenberg, J., Huisman, M. and Mentz, E., 2014. Knowledge and Skills Requirements for Software Developer Students. World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology, International Journal of Social, Behavioral, Educational, Economic, Business and Industrial Engineering, 8(8), pp.2604-2609.

5  Cass, S., 2015. The 2015 top ten programming languages. IEEE Spectrum, July, 20.

6  Ahmed, F., Capretz, L.F., Bouktif, S. and Campbell, P., 2015. Soft skills and software development: A reflection from the software industry. arXiv preprint arXiv:1507.06873.

7  Fidalgo-Blanco, Á., Sein-Echaluce, M.L., García-Peñalvo, F.J. and Conde, M.Á., 2015. Using Learning Analytics to improve teamwork assessment. Computers in Human Behavior, 47, pp.149-156.

8  Braude, E.J. and Bernstein, M.E., 2016. Software engineering: modern approaches. Waveland Press.

9  Jiang, J. and Yang, B., 2015. Roles of creative process engagement and leader–member exchange in critical thinking and employee creativity. Social Behavior and Personality: an international journal, 43(7), pp.1217-1231.

10 Padhye, R., Mani, S. and Sinha, V.S., 2014, May. A study of external community contribution to open-source projects on GitHub. In Proceedings of the 11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (pp. 332-335). ACM.

11  Oliveto, R., Hindle, A. and Lawrie, D.J., 2017. Source code analysis and manipulation. The Journal of Systems & Software, (129), pp.58-59.

12  Microsoft Learning. (2018). Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer (MCSD) Certification | Microsoft Learning. [online] Available at: https://www.microsoft.com/en-in/learning/mcsd-certification.aspx [Accessed 20 Mar. 2018].

13  Amazon Web Services, Inc. (2018). AWS Certification - AWS Cloud Computing Certification Program. [online] Available at: https://aws.amazon.com/certification/ [Accessed 20 Mar. 2018].

14  Acs.org.au. (2018). [online] Available at: https://www.acs.org.au/content/dam/acs/acs-documents/CBOK-FAQ-2016.pdf [Accessed 20 Mar. 2018].

15  Bender, L., Walia, G.S., Fagerholm, F., Pagels, M., Nygard, K.E. and Münch, J., 2014, July. Measurement of the Non-Technical Skills of Software Professionals: An Empirical Investigation. In SEKE (pp. 478-483).