Investigating the Impact of Team Formation by Introversion/Extraversion in Software Projects

Abstract

Human factors have an important effect on performance of software teams and resulting software products. One of the seldom-studied aspects of human factors is the effect of personality-based team formation on team cohesion and quality of the software product. In this study, we investigate the above effect by conducting an exploratory case study during a term-long undergraduate software engineering course containing a project component with 50 undergraduate students. We grouped the students based on the social-interaction dimension (introversion/ extraversion) of the well-known Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) personality assessment model. We then collected the relevant metrics to explore/analyze the two parameters of interest in our study: team cohesion, and project grade as an indicator of project output (i.e. resulting product quality). Our results show that there is some (although weak) relationship between the team formation scheme (based on either introversion or extraversion) with group performance and project grade. The results also show that mixed grouping of personality types has no significant effect on team cohesion but is advantageous in achieving higher project grades especially for people with low GPAs.

Correlation of critical success factors with success of software projects: an empirical investigation

“…& "Customer skill, training and education" and "Customer experience" in the base model are somewhat unclear and overlapping with one another, and as a result, based on reviews (Ahimbisibwe et al 2015) and the relevant literature, we expanded them to "Customer skill, training and education in IT", and "Customer experience in its own business domain" since the two aspect shall be separated as a customer may have a good skill level in one and not in the other. & As a result of our recent research (Karapıçak and Demirörs 2013;Garousi and Tarhan 2018) on studying the need to consider personality types in software team formations, and discussion with and feedback from our industry partners in the course of our long-term industry-academia collaborations (e.g., (Garousi and Herkiloğlu 2016;Garousi et al 2016a;Garousi et al 2016b;Garousi et al 2015a)), we added "Team building and team dynamics" as a new CSF to the 'process' category of project success. Throughout our industrial projects, we have observed many times that one side product of successful projects is the project's influence in positive team building, improving team dynamics (compared to the state before the project), and enhancing team members' opinions about each other.…”