Links between the personalities, views and attitudes of software engineers

Abstract

Successful software development and management depends not only on the technologies, methods and processes employed but also on the judgments and decisions of the humans involved. These, in turn, are affected by the basic views and attitudes of the individual engineers. The objective of this paper is to establish if these views and attitudes can be linked to the personalities of software engineers. We summarize the literature on personality and software engineering and then describe an empirical study on 47 professional engineers in ten different Swedish software development companies. The study evaluated the personalities of these engineers via the IPIP 50-item five-factor personality test and prompted them on their attitudes towards and basic views on their professional activities. We present extensive statistical analyses of their responses to show that there are multiple, significant associations between personality factors and software engineering attitudes. The tested individuals are more homogeneous in personality than a larger sample of individuals from the general population. Taken together, the methodology and personality test we propose and the associated statistical analyses can help find and quantify relations between complex factors in software engineering projects in both research and practice.

Personality, emotional intelligence and work preferences in software engineering: An empirical study

“… results for the present set of subjects that are partially consistent with our previous results in [6], thus further strengthening them and the methods used,  to show that one new (emotional intelligence) but not another (self-compassion) psychometric construct show associations to software development preferences,  further statistical analysis of association between the software development preferences and  a concrete example of an operational replication study in SE.…”

“…There have been several calls to value and study human factors in SE [1,2,3] and in recent years there has also been an increase in empirical studies [4,5,6,7]. Even though technical and methodological innovation and improvement is essential to progress the developers themselves are often the same and their motivations, needs, characteristics and even idiosyncrasies must be understood to improve the socio-technical system as a whole.…”

“…This is likely the reason why some studies show clear links [6] while others show little or no effects [4] of personality of developers on their preferences and performance in the software development process. This does not come as a surprise if we take into account that personality is one of the most complex concepts in the social sciences and its conceptualization and analysis is one of the most challenging tasks in psychology [10].…”

“…When studies have considered the personality of developers empirically, they have primarily used dated models or metrics that have been criticized within psychology [20], in particular the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) [21,22,23,24,25]. In contrast, Feldt et al [6] used the modern and more scientifically validated Five-Factor Model (FFM) and found significant associations between personality factors and the attitudes and preferences 2 of 47 industrial software developers. The more detailed and nuanced picture of personality offered by the five-factor model allows statistical analysis that can help identify and quantify complex relations between individual, team and project factors in SE projects.…”

“…In the quest of a deeper understanding of the preferences of software engineers and how their personal characteristics can affect their professional decisions, this paper presents an operational, external replication study [26] of our previous study [6] in which we keep our measured constructs and the statistical analysis methods intact, while extending with additional psychometric instruments and using a different, larger set of subjects. The data we investigate is the responses to three different psychometric instruments by a total of 279 graduate students in a Master of Science program in Software Engineering at a Swedish University.…”