A Software Engineer is a person who applies a wide range of application development knowledge to the systematic development of the system for organizations. Software engineer’s job has evolved to include analysis, evaluation, selection, and use of specific systematic approaches to the development, operation, maintenance, and improvement of the software.
Skills of Software Engineers
Software engineers must possess varying kinds of skills, such as General Skills, Programming Skills, Communication Skills, and Design Skills. All of these skills are briefly discussed below.
1. General Skills
Software engineers must possess the following general skills:
- Interviewing skills to facilitate the acquisition of information.
- Group work skills, including participating in meetings and the ability to work collaboratively.
- Facilitation skills, such as the ability to lead a group.
- Negotiation skills, to support consensus building.
- Analytical skills, to support the analysis of an organizational situation before any proposals for solutions.
- Problem-solving skills, to support the search for alternative solutions.
- Presentation skills, including the ability to write coherent documents using word processors.
- Modeling skills, including businesses, processes, data, and object modeling, using a variety of notations.
2. Programming skills
Software engineers must possess programming skills. Programming skills mainly include the knowledge of the following:
- Data structures and algorithms.
- Programming languages.
- Tools: compilers, debuggers, editors.
3. Communication Skills
Communication skills are quite important for software engineers, as they have to converse with different types of persons at different times, Communication skills mainly include the following:
- Spoken, written, presentations.
- Teamwork.
- With external people.
4. Design Skills
Software engineers must be a good designer. Software engineers should:
- Be familiar with several approaches.
- Be flexible and open to different application domains.
-
Be able to shift between several levels of abstraction.
- Application domain jargon and model.
- requirements and specifications declarative model.
- Architectural design, high level operational model.
- Detailed coding