MEASURING THE SOFTWARE ENGINEERING COMPETENCIES: A SRI LANKAN SOFTWARE INDUSTRY PERPECTIVE

Sri Lanka an emerging nation among the global software product engineering industry strives towards nurturing the competencies of present and future software engineering practitioners and strategizes in becoming one of the top nations in the industry. Building people with the right mix of product engineering mindset and agile practice is the key challenge for Sri Lanka as well. The purpose and aim of the research is to determine the future landscape of the software product engineering industry within Sri Lanka and identify the competencies essential for software engineering practitioners. The research adopts a mixed mode study, using Grounded Theory and quantitative techniques for data gathering, analyzing and interpretations. Findings presents a significant gap within the present competencies of the software engineering practitioners and future software engineering practitioners who are currently studying as undergraduates. The solutions to overcome these challenges are within immediate and long term plans which mainly needs to be addressed by improving the practices related to software product engineering. The findings of this study would benefit the current and future software engineering students, software engineering practitioners and academics of the tertiary education system.