Page - 181 - in The Future of Software Quality Assurance

Developing Software Qualityand Testing Capabilities inHispanic America:... 181 3.2 HumanCompetencies At the turn of the present century, industry and professional associations, as well as academic forums recognised the need to better prepare future professionals for life in the workplace. Some engineering educators called for a more rounded and integrativeapproach,asopposedto theprevailinganalyticalandreductionistmodel [25].TheUSA’sNationalAcademyofEngineeringstatedtheseneededattributesof engineersbyyear2020[26]: stronganalytical skills; practical ingenuity;creativity; communication; business and management; leadership; high ethical standards; professionalism;dynamism,agility, resilience, andflexibility; lifelong learning. Those attributes agree with the findings reported in what employers express in surveys presented in [7] and [27], where the human, non-technical, attributes mentioned by 50% or more of the respondents include: leadership; ability to work in a team; communicationskills (written and verbal);problem-solvingskills; work ethic; initiative; analytical/critical/quantitative skills; flexibility/adaptability; interpersonalskills; organizationalability; strategicplanningskills. There is a trend in engineering education and accreditation schemes to include ‘soft skills’ in addition to more ‘engineering skills’ as part of graduate attributes from engineering degrees. The foremost example is the International Engineering Alliance (IEA) Graduate Attribute Profile [28], “Graduate attributes form a set of individually assessable outcomes that are the components indicative of the grad- uate’s potential to acquire competence to practise at the appropriate level”; these comprise:(1)engineeringknowledge,(2)problemanalysis, (3)design/development of solutions, (4) investigation, (5) modern tool usage, (6) the engineer and society, (7) environment and sustainability, (8) ethics, (9) individual and team work, (10) communication, (11)projectmanagementandfinance, (12) lifelong learning. Professional work in software quality assurance or software testing improves when individuals have developed their communication and teamwork capabilities. Forexample,we highlight the matterwith quotations takenfrom[29]: • Errors may occur for many reasons, such as [...] Miscommunication between project participants, including miscommunication about requirements and design • Atester’smindset should includecuriosity,professional pessimism,acriticaleye,atten- tion to detail, and a motivation for good and positive communications and relationships • In some cases organizational and cultural issues may inhibit communication between team members, which can impede iterative development • Additional benefits of static testing may include: [...] Improving communication between teammembers in the course ofparticipating in reviews • Potentialdrawbacks of test independence include: – Isolation from the development team, leading to a lack of collaboration, delays in providing feedback to the development team, or an adversarial relationship with the development team – Developers may lose a sense of responsibility forquality – Independent testersmaybeseenasabottleneckorblamedfordelays inrelease [...]