What Characterizes a Software Leader? Identifying Leadership Practices from Practitioners Social Media

A team of six researchers led by Murilo Coelho analyzed 116 articles published on a software engineering practitioner community (the paper references an online platform) to extract and categorize leadership practices as experienced by real-world developers. The qualitative content analysis yielded 103 distinct practices, which were then organized into five categories: People Management & Development, Processes & Execution, Professional & Personal Growth, Communication & Articulation, and Strategic Vision. The most frequently recommended practices were Cultivating & Practicing Interpersonal Skills, Managing & Delegating Team Work, and Practicing & Developing Managerial Skills. On the flip side, Micromanagement, Counterproductive Work Patterns, and Counterproductive Communication Styles emerged as the top discouraged behaviors.

The study, submitted to arXiv in April 2026 and accepted at the International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE) 2026, concludes that software leadership is primarily associated with managerial and interpersonal practices rather than deep technical expertise. The resulting conceptual map serves as a practical reference for understanding leadership in software development contexts. Notably, the research focuses on the lived experiences of practitioners as shared on social media, offering a ground-up perspective that complements traditional top-down leadership models. This shift highlights that effective software leaders are those who prioritize team dynamics, clear communication, and strategic vision over coding prowess alone.