Generic skills in software engineering master thesis projects: towards rubric-based evaluation

In English 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.