Qualitative Analysis of Industry Personnel’s Perspective on Future Ready Software Engineering Undergraduate Employability

Abstract

In order to determine whether a requirements statement has been well-defined, it is necessary to read the statement from the developer’s perspective. Requirements engineering (RE) encompasses all activities involved in discovering, documenting, and maintaining a set of requirements for a system. The importance of RE can be understood in light of the problems software developers face in attempting to anticipate stakeholders’ requirements.  The failure to correctly predict stakeholders’ requirements would result in a lot of extra work. Without accurate, consistent, and complete requirements specifications, it is very difficult to develop, change, and maintain software.  The objective of this research is to obtain feedback from industry experts to understand the challenges related to the employability of future-ready software engineering undergraduate students. This research employs a qualitative study to gather the views of the experts. The NVivo tool is used to analyze the data. The results of the sources are written in free node code. The practitioners agreed that the problem regarding undergraduate students is due to students being taught only theories but given a project assignment to complete in their final semester. The current industry practice is to form a team; follow a specific process for developing software, beginning with meeting the correct requirements, and staying abreast of requirement changes based on received feedback. To align practices across higher education and industry, practitioners proposed better collaboration between institutions of higher education and industry by regularly assigning hands-on projects to equip students with the required knowledge and skills. This ensure that graduating students have the knowledge and skills to make a smooth, competent transition from student to employee.