Soft Skills Requirements in Software Architecture’s Job:
An Exploratory Study

Faheem Ahmed, Piers Campbell, Azam Beg, Luiz Fernando Capretz

The job of software architect is considered very crucial in the life cycle of the software development because software architecture has a pivotal role in the success and failure of the software project in terms of cost and quality. People have different personality traits, and the way they perceive, plan and execute any assigned task is influenced by it. These personality traits are characterized by soft skills. Most of the time, software development is a team work involving several people executing different tasks. The success and failure stories of software projects revealed the human factor as one of the critical importance. In this work we are presenting an exploratory study about the soft skills requirements for a software architect’s job. We analyzed 124 advertised jobs in the title of software architect and explore the soft skills requirements. The results of this investigation help in understanding software skills requirement set for a job of software architect and presents the current status of their use in job advertisements.

Faheem Ahmed

Bio

Faheem Ahmed received his M.E.Sc. (2004) and Ph.D. (2006) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Western Ontario (Canada). Currently he is an assistant professor at the College of Information Technology, UAE University, Al Ain, United Arab Emirates. Ahmed has several years of industrial experience, holding various technical positions in software development organizations. During his professional career, he has been actively involved in the entire life cycle of the software development process, including requirements management, system analysis and design, software development, testing, delivery and maintenance. Ahmed has authored and co-authored many peer-reviewed research articles in leading journals and conference proceedings in the area of software engineering, and he has co-authored the book, Software Product Lines: A Process Assessment Methodology – A Practitioner’s Approach, published by VDM-Verlag. Ahmed’s current research interests are software product lines, software process modelling, software process assessment, and empirical software engineering. He is a member of IEEE, and he can be reached at f.ahmed@uaeu.ac.ae.