What Literacy for Software Developers?

Abstract

There is a paradigm shift towards service orientation. Service orientation requires an education less oriented to a strictly computer-oriented knowledge, and education containing basics of thinking of empirical sciences and, to some degree, also humanities. The reason is, among others, the fact that the service interfaces in the service-oriented system should be user oriented—they should be based on knowledge, habits, and languages of a user problem domain. It is, however, difficult for many computer people to use user domain knowledge, as they often are overly proud of their computer knowledge (and underestimate knowledge of other disciplines—knowledge domains of the system users inclusive). We call this attitude ‘hacker syndrome’. The hacker syndrome is the main obstacle to do analysis and to apply modern software practices like agile programming and service-oriented software architectures. Hacker syndrome prevention can be based on curricula ensuring training of the knowledge important for the development of service-oriented systems. Such a training can enhance job and career opportunities of software experts in near as well as in far future.