Universality of Egoless Behavior of Software Engineering Students

Software organizations have relied on process and technology initiatives to compete in a highly globalized world. Unfortunately, that has led to little or no success. The authors propose that the organizations start working on people initiatives, such as inspiring egoless behavior among software developers. This paper proposes a multi-stage approach to encourage egoless behavior and discusses the universality of the egoless behavior by studying cohorts from three different countries, i.e., Japan, India, and Canada. The three stages in the approach are self-assessment, peer validation, and action plan development. The instrument to assess egoless behavior is based on Lamont Adams' “Ten commandments of egoless programming” – seven of the commandments are general, whereas three are related to coding behavior. The authors have found that students display relatively poorer egoless behavior in coding related than general commandments. The authors found traces of universality in the egoless behavior among the three cohorts.