Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
the course-of-action analysis: interpretations, feelings, judgments, actors' commit-
ment to the situation and their use of past experience in the course-of- action.
Recording project assessment.
The project has to record artifacts produced by pro-
ject progress: lecture notes, progress meeting report, peer review reports which consti-
tute valuable inputs for further analysis.
Recording competency assessment.
We argue that personal capability determination
(rather than process capability determination) is more suitable to VSEs because em-
ployees may perceive it as a valuable benefit. Using the 2-level structure of our Proc-
ess Reference Model (on the left part of figure 4), we analyze carefully SE activities
in order to define abilities mobilized (or competencies: “the ability of a person to act
in a pertinent way in a given situation in order to achieve specific purposes [20]”). For
each process, we defined a family of competencies constituted with a list of knowl-
edge topics and a set of abilities or skills required to perform the process (see an ex-
ample in table 1).
Table 1.
An example of a competency family: “Software detailed design'
Knowledge topics
Abilities or skills
Software Design Fundamentals : concepts
and principles, design role in a
development cycle, top-level and detailed
design
To use design methods and tools (in
relation with requirements) to produce
design documents: system and software
architecture and detailed design
Software decomposition configuration
item, software component, software unit
To implement methods and modeling tools
of various aspects of a system (architecture
and decomposition software, data structure)
Software architecture through different
views: conceptual, dynamic, physical,
data.
To implement J2EE development and
technology of associated framework
UML diagrams to describe static and
dynamic views
To implement DBMS concepts, techniques
and tools
Object-oriented design
We believe that a first step in competency development should be made by the engi-
neer him/herself through a self-assessment of abilities at a maturity level. The assess-
ment scale grows from 1 to 5: - 1: Smog - 2: Notion - 3: User - 4: Autonomous - 5:
Expert. Each young engineer is required to periodically fill the 13 competency families
while auto-analyzing the tasks performed and him/her achievement level with the abili-
ties defined in the family. This periodic inventory is supported by eCompas, a tool in-
tended to manage development, assessment and value-added of competencies over the
course of a curriculum or a professional career.
The eCompas tool is intended to store artifacts that may be interesting to illustrate
the ability determination. Each time a software engineer self-assesses a process's
ability level, he/she has to write an entry associated with the process and may link this
entry with artifacts stored. It constitutes a rudimentary portfolio, but sufficient for our
purposes. This tool needs to be reengineered to work with the wikis' architecture.
