An examination of personality traits and how they impact on software development teams

Abstract

Context: Research has shown that a significant number of software projects fail due to social issues such as team or personality conflicts. However, only a limited number of empirical studies have been undertaken to understand the impact of individuals' personalities on software team configurations. These studies suffer from an important limitation as they lack a systematic and rigorous method to relate personality traits of software practitioners and software team structures. Objective: Based on an interactive personality profiling approach, the goal of this study is to reveal the personality traits of software practitioners with an aim to explore effective software team structures. Method: To explore the importance of individuals' personalities on software teams, we employed a two-step empirical approach. Firstly, to assess the personality traits of software practitioners, we developed a context-specific survey instrument, which was conducted on 216 participants from a middle-sized software company. Secondly, we propose a novel team personality illustration method to visualize team structures. Results: Study results indicated that effective team structures support teams with higher emotional stability, agreeableness, extroversion, and conscientiousness personality traits. Conclusion: Furthermore, empirical results of the current study show that extroversion trait was more predominant than previously suggested in the literature, which was especially more observable among agile software development teams.

Advancing the Study of Human Values in Software Engineering

“…Another possibility is that values may be strongly influenced by different SE roles, such as business analysts, product owners, testers, etc. Our research has not taken into account potential differences in values priorities according to role, though other research has found that different SE roles were associated with different personality traits [38].…”

More effective sprint retrospective with statistical analysis

“…Team members should be focused and interested in their work. A study is also conducted to reveal the personality traits of software developers with the aim to explore effective team structures, and results indicates that effective team structures encourage teams with higher emotional stability, agreeableness, extroversion, and conscientiousness personality traits. After we are completely sure that the team has these essentials, we started to collect related data from the team.…”

“…Results show that the least variations are observed in sprint length, size of team, and requirement engineering process, while the most varied ones are in roles, relative estimations, and quality events. As quality events include measuring, monitoring, and evaluating the process for improvement opportunities, implementing that Agile methodology has a major importance in determination to help the team better understand their development process in terms of enhancing ability to manage changing priorities, improving visibility of project, and improving the team's morale . This is possible by measuring the progress as the team has a systematic development method to relate personal traits of developers and project's structure as well as improving alignment between business objectives and process.…”

Assessing Personality Traits in a Large Scale Software Development Company: Exploratory Industrial Case Study

“…For instance, managing successfully changing requirements, having strong communication with customers, and working as a cross functional team. We aim to reveal and illustrate personality characteristics by using an interactive (game-like) assessment based on context specific questions [14]. Concerning this goal, we derived the following research questions: RQ1: How the software practitioners' personality traits are distributed according to the Big Five Inventory (BFI) [15] dimensions in software development teams?…”