Metacognition and Software Developer Competency: Construct Development and Empirical Validation

Software developer competence is essential for developing quality systems. Typically past experience, education and training, academic and professional references, tests, and interviews are used to assess developer competence. In this paper we propose that to obtain a holistic assessment of competence, it is essential to evaluate developer perceptions and beliefs on what they can achieve since these beliefs can impact their performance, independent of the skills possessed. Using social cognitive theory, we propose and develop a measure of developer self-efficacy, a metacognitive factor, to assess a critical facet of developer competence. We also empirically validate our self-efficacy measure through an experiment, and discuss the results of the findings.