WIP: A Preliminary Framework for Fostering Leadership Skills in Software Engineering Students

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.