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Introducing an Approach to Developing Egoless Software Engineers

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Conference

2015 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Seattle, Washington

Publication Date

June 14, 2015

Start Date

June 14, 2015

End Date

June 17, 2015

ISBN

978-0-692-50180-1

ISSN

2153-5965

Conference Session

Teaching and Learning Strategies II

Tagged Division

Educational Research and Methods

Page Count

11

Page Numbers

26.1022.1 - 26.1022.11

DOI

10.18260/p.24359

Permanent URL

https://strategy.asee.org/24359

Download Count

616

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Paper Authors

biography

Pradeep Kashinath Waychal NMIMS University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0001-8142-2464

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Pradeep Waychal is heading NMIMS University - Shirpur Campus that caters to education in engineering, technology management, pharmacy and textile. He has 30 years of experience in renowned business and academic organizations. He was the founder and head of Innovation Center of College of Engineering Pune. Prior to that, for over 20 years, he has worked with a multinational corporation, Patni Computer Systems where he has played varied roles in delivery, corporate and sales organizations. Pradeep was on the apex senior management group before proceeding on to pursue his academic, research and social interests. Before Patni, he has worked at IIT Delhi, IIT Bombay and Crompton Greaves R & D Electronics. Pradeep has also published papers in peer reviewed journals, presented keynote / invited talks in many high profile international conferences and I involved in a few copyrights / patents. He / his teams have won a range of awards in Engineering Education, Six Sigma and Knowledge Management at international events. He has completed Ph D in the area of Information Technology and Innovation Management from IIT Bombay in a record time of three years. His current research interests are engineering education, software engineering and innovation management. Recently his paper won the Best Teaching Strategies Paper award at the most respected international conference in the area of engineering education - Annual conference of American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE).

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biography

Gautam Akiwate University of California, San Diego

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Gautam Akiwate is currently a graduate student at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering
at the University of California, San Diego with broad areas of interest. He got his bachelor’s degree from
the College of Engineering, Pune. While in COEP, Gautam was involved in a lot of activities including
a CUBESAT mission. Gautam’s current research interests are systems and networking in addition to
engineering education

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Abstract

Introducing an Approach to Develop Egoless Software EngineersSoftware organizations compete in a highly globalized world mandating continuous improvement intheir performance. Traditionally, these organizations have relied on process and technologydimensions which led to little or no success, and now, must think through the critical peopledimension. One of the most important initiatives in the people dimension can be developing egolessengineers as suggested by Weinberg. This paper proposes a multi-stage approach to developingegoless engineers and discusses the first two stages of the approach, which are self-assessment andpeer validation. The third stage - developing and executing team and individual action plans - isbeing worked on. To assess egoless behavior, we use an instrument based on Lamont Adams’ "Tencommandments of egoless programming".The paper reports the use of this instrument on eighty six software engineering students of a juniorclass of a computer engineering undergraduate program and also reports its reliability. The analysisincludes “egoless” behavior of the class as well as its correlation with determinants like gender,semester and cumulative grade point averages (SGPA and CGPA). We have found that egolessbehavior is not correlated with gender but is strongly correlated with academic performanceespecially the recent semester’s performance. We are working on the peer validation and plan toinclude that in the paper. The proposed approach can be used to systematically develop egolessengineers in the industrial setting that could result in improvement in the performance of projectteams and therefore of organizations. The paper also reports various limitations of the study such asthe need to repeat the experiment in different settings including other disciplines of engineering andthe need to refine the instrument by using rubrics and making the questions more inferential thandirect.

Waychal, P. K., & Akiwate, G. (2015, June), Introducing an Approach to Developing Egoless Software Engineers Paper presented at 2015 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Seattle, Washington. 10.18260/p.24359

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2015 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015