Hard and Soft Skills for Scrum Global Software Development Teams

Abstract

Scrum is considered as one of the solutions to overcome problems encountered in global software development (GSD). The skills of a Scrum team largely determine the successful implementation of Scrum in a GSD project. The present study aims to identify and rank the essential skills for Scrum GSD teams. First, we identified five hard skills and five soft skills by conducting a literature study and depth interviews with a software engineering expert. Second, these skills were arranged into a questionnaire, which was then distributed to thirty undergraduate students taking software engineering subjects. The students were considered as Scrum beginners in development teams. The questionnaire data were subsequently analyzed by ranking the importance of the skills. Next, the rankings were validated in a focus group discussion (FGD) with four practitioners, two academics, one policymaker, and one representative of a relevant professional association. All members of the FGD had at least five years of experience in Scrum GSD. In the following stage, frequency analysis was employed to achieve a consensus among the experts. After that, a round table discussion was conducted to confirm the consensus. The results show that programming is the most important hard skill, while interpersonal and communication are the most important soft skills. Database expertise and leadership were identified as the least important hard and soft skills, respectively. Furthermore, the rank of these skills by importance is aligned with the nature of Scrum and GSD. Our findings can be used as a foundation to construct competencies in Scrum GSD teams.