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

Abstract

Software development methodologies become increasingly more people and team-oriented. However, many software projects fail due to conflicts of team members. Formation of an effective software development team may be particularly challenging given the differences inherent across an individual's personality. This paper explores personality traits of agile software development teams by using a context-specific interactive assessment. Concerning the assessment, we have conducted a questionnaire with 110 participants from a large-scale software development company. We have visualized personality traits with team radar charts showing the personality traits of 18 project teams and analyzed the results by validation interviews. Our preliminary results indicate that higher introversion is observed most commonly in isolated teams that has less contact with customers. Moreover, high levels of agreeableness and conscientiousness personality traits are observed in most of the agile software development teams.

Managing the social aspects of software development ecosystems: An industrial case study on personality

“…Later, context cards were employed in another study that used the gamification approach to improve the software development process by exploring the personality of software practitioners 16 . Moreover, in an exploratory case study, this approach was used 51 …”

“…First, the assessment model uses a group of contextual questions based on the situations faced at the software domain, which presents familiar concepts to practitioners and assists to retrieve to attain a more accurate judgment. This assessment was an exclusive example within the software engineering field, and it was published in recognized conferences and journals 18,50,51 . Moreover, this approach was quite straightforward to implement in a large‐scaled software company due to its systematic manner and interactive game concepts.…”

Using Personality Detection Tools for Software Engineering Research: How Far Can We Go?

“…They found managers to be more conscientious and extroverted, and agile developers to be more neurotic and extroverted. Akarsu et al [4] studied the personality traits by administering the BFI to 18 agile teams. They found that high levels of agreeableness and conscientiousness were common in most teams.…”

A Strategy Based on Genetic Algorithms for Forming Optimal Collaborative Learning Groups: An Empirical Study

“…Now, from the pedagogical point of view, it is confirming that not considering criteria related to personality traits before the group formation has generally led to lower results. Taking into account personality traits in the group formation process enhances their collaborative performance when it comes to software development activities [78,[82][83][84][85][86][87][88][89][90]. In this aspect, the highlight of the study is that those groups whose formation has been pre-established by the teachers through the proposed strategy, in general, have had a better collaborative performance than groups with traditional formation, except in the case of heterogeneous training.…”