Development of Body of Knowledge of Software Engineering Soft Skills

In recent years, the significance of soft skills in software engineering has been increasingly recognized, and their value has been substantiated by a body of literature. While the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) provides a well-established framework for technical competencies, Sedelmaier and Landes proposed the Software Engineering Body of Soft Skills (SWEBOS) as a framework for soft skills. SWEBOS shows three top soft skills and the following seven soft skills and presents a hierarchical structure of these skills; however, it does not explicitly define the interrelationships among them. In this study, we propose a model that elucidates the relationships among the three top soft skills—namely, “Problem awareness and solving,” “Collaboration,” and “Personal competencies”—as well as the hierarchical relationships across varying levels of abstraction inherent to the framework.