Expertise Roles and Skills Required by the Software Development Industry

In today's dynamic work environments, where software systems are mainly dominant, the identification of the professional roles and responsibilities required by the software development industry (SDI) is crucial to meeting the demand for qualified labor in the market. From this perspective, the purpose of this study is identification of expertise roles, knowledge, and skills required by the SDI by investigating software development-focused job postings. The methodology of the study is based on semantic content analysis of the job postings using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a generative model for probabilistic topic modeling. As a result of this analysis, 30 topics demonstrating knowledge and skills required by the SDI were discovered. Besides, 20 distinct expertise roles indicating job descriptions essential for SDI were identified. The findings of this study indicate that the SDI requires a wide spectrum of expertise roles, knowledge and skills. Each of software development jobs contains specific knowledge and skills that define the scope of expertise roles in the SDI.