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

Yilmaz, Murat orcid logoORCID: 0000-0002-2446-3224, O'Connor, Rory orcid logoORCID: 0000-0001-9253-0313, Colomo-Palacios, Ricardo orcid logoORCID: 0000-0002-1555-9726 and Clarke, Paul orcid logoORCID: 0000-0002-4487-627X (2017) An examination of personality traits and how they impact on software development teams. Information and Software Technology, 86 . pp. 101-122. ISSN 0950-5849

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.
Metadata
Item Type:Article (Published)
Refereed:Yes
Uncontrolled Keywords:Software Team Visualization; Interactive Personality Assessment; Software Developer Personality Traits; Social Aspects of Software Development
Subjects:Business > Personnel management
Computer Science > Information technology
Computer Science > Software engineering
DCU Faculties and Centres:Research Initiatives and Centres > Lero: The Irish Software Engineering Research Centre
DCU Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Engineering and Computing > School of Computing
Publisher:Elsevier
Official URL:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2017.01.005
Copyright Information:© 2017 Elsevier
Use License:This item is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. View License
ID Code:21801
Deposited On:17 May 2017 09:50 by Rory O'connor . Last Modified 23 Oct 2019 13:05
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