Generic Skills in Software Engineering Master Thesis Projects: Towards Rubric-Based Evaluation

There has been much recent interest in how to help students in higher education develop their generic skills, especially since this is a focus of the Bologna process that aims to standardize European higher education. However, even though the Master thesis is the final and often crucial part of a graduate degree and requires many generic skills very little research has directly focused on them. In particular, there is a lack of such knowledge for engineering education programs. In this paper we present results from a survey where we asked 23 students from three different Swedish Universities about which generic skills are needed and developed in a Master thesis project in software engineering. One outcome of our analysis is that there is a lack of understanding on how to define, and thus examine, generic skills in software engineering thesis projects.