skip to main content
10.1145/3463274.3463327acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PageseaseConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Relationships between Personality Traits and Productivity in a Multi-platform Development Context

Published:21 June 2021Publication History

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we conduct an empirical study aiming at investigating how personality traits can affect the productivity of software developers in the context of the distributed development of multi-platform apps within a software project stored in GitHub. Participants were 31 master’s students in Computer Science grouped in 13 teams. Data were gathered from the compilation of the IPIP-NEO-120 questionnaire, a largely adopted tool to estimate personality traits, and from the software projects. We analyzed the correlation between personality traits (and their facets) and the productivity metrics. The results of this preliminary study seem to reveal that the most productive participants are those with the highest scores for the personality traits of Agreeableness and Conscientiousness.

References

  1. Silvia T Acuña, Marta N Gómez, Jo E Hannay, Natalia Juristo, and Dietmar Pfahl. 2015. Are team personality and climate related to satisfaction and software quality? Aggregating results from a twice replicated experiment. Information and Software Technology 57 (2015), 141–156.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  2. Silvia T. Acuña, Marta Gómez, and Natalia Juristo. 2009. How do personality, team processes and task characteristics relate to job satisfaction and software quality?Information and Software Technology 51, 3 (2009), 627 – 639.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  3. John Aldrich. 1995. Correlations Genuine and Spurious in Pearson and Yule. Statist. Sci. 10, 4 (1995), 364–376.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  4. Aamir Amin, Shuib Basri, Mobashar Rahman, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Rehan Akbar, Abdul Rehman Gilal, and Muhammad Farooq Shabbir. 2020. The impact of personality traits and knowledge collection behavior on programmer creativity. Information and Software Technology 128 (2020), 106405.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  5. Greg Anderson, Mark J Keith, Julianne Francisco, and Sarah Fox. 2018. The Effect of Software Team Personality Composition on Learning and Performance: Making the” Dream” Team. In Proc. of the 51st Hawaii international conference on system sciences.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  6. M. R. Barrick and M. K. Mount. 1991. The Big Five Personality Dimensions And Job Performance: A Meta-Analysis. Personnel Psychology 44, 1 (1991), 1–26.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  7. B. Bazelli, A. Hindle, and E. Stroulia. 2013. On the Personality Traits of StackOverflow Users. In Proc. of IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance. 460–463.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  8. Fabio Calefato, Giuseppe Iaffaldano, Filippo Lanubile, and Bogdan Vasilescu. 2018. On Developers’ Personality in Large-Scale Distributed Projects: The Case of the Apache Ecosystem. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Global Software Engineering(ICGSE ’18). ACM, 92–101.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  9. G.V. Caprara, C. Barbaranelli, L. Borgogni, and M. Perugini. 1993. The “big five questionnaire”: A new questionnaire to assess the five factor model. Personality and Individual Differences 15, 3 (1993), 281 – 288.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  10. Azer Celikten and Aydin Cetin. 2017. Assigning Product Development roles to Software Engineers based on Personality types and Skills. (2017).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  11. Deborah A. Cobb-Clark and Stefanie Schurer. 2012. The stability of big-five personality traits. Economics Letters 115, 1 (2012), 11 – 15.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  12. Paul T. Costa and Robert R. McCrae. 1992. Four ways five factors are basic. Personality and Individual Differences 13, 6 (1992), 653 – 665.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  13. Maria Cubel, Ana Nuevo-Chiquero, Santiago Sanchez-Pages, and Marian Vidal-Fernandez. 2016. Do Personality Traits Affect Productivity? Evidence from the Laboratory. The Economic Journal 126, 592 (2016), 654–681.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  14. Eduardo Fernandes, Luiz Ferreira, Eduardo Figueiredo, and Marco Valente. 2017. How Clear is Your Code? An Empirical Study with Programming Challenges.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  15. Robert J Grissom and John J Kim. 2005. Effect sizes for research: A broad practical approach.Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  16. Maurice H. Halstead. 1977. Elements of Software Science (Operating and Programming Systems Series). Elsevier Science Inc., USA.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  17. Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman. 1996. R: a language for data analysis and graphics. Journal of computational and graphical statistics 5, 3 (1996), 299–314.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  18. John A. Johnson. 2014. Measuring thirty facets of the Five Factor Model with a 120-item public domain inventory: Development of the IPIP-NEO-120. Journal of Research in Personality 51 (2014), 78 – 89.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  19. Constance J. Jones, Norman Livson, and Harvey Peskin. 2006. Paths of psychological health: Examination of 40-year trajectories from the Intergenerational Studies. Journal of Research in Personality 40, 1 (2006), 56 – 72.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  20. Timothy Judge, Chad Higgins, Carl Thoresen, and Murray Barrick. 1999. The Big Five Personality Traits, General Mental Ability, and Career Success Across the Life Span. Personnel Psychology 52(1999), 621 – 652.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  21. Tanjila Kanij, Robert Merkel, and John Grundy. 2015. An empirical investigation of personality traits of software testers. In Proc. of International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering. IEEE, 1–7.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  22. D. Keirsey and M.M. Bates. 1978. Please understand me: an essay on temperament styles. Prometheus Nemesis Books.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  23. I.B. Myers. 1998. MBTI Manual: A Guide to the Development and Use of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Consulting Psychologists Press.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  24. Edson Oliveira, Eduardo Fernandes, Igor Steinmacher, Marco Cristo, Tayana Conte, and Alessandro Garcia. 2020. Code and commit metrics of developer productivity: a study on team leaders perceptions. Empirical Software Engineering 25, 4 (2020), 2519–2549.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  25. Edson Oliveira, Eduardo Fernandes, Igor Steinmacher, Marco Cristo, Tayana Conte, and Alessandro Garcia. 2020. Code and commit metrics of developer productivity: a study on team leaders perceptions. Empirical Software Engineering 25, 4 (2020), 2519–2549.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  26. A. Rastogi and N. Nagappan. 2016. On the Personality Traits of GitHub Contributors. In Proc. of IEEE 27th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering. 77–86.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  27. P. C. Rigby and A. E. Hassan. 2007. What Can OSS Mailing Lists Tell Us? A Preliminary Psychometric Text Analysis of the Apache Developer Mailing List. In Proc. of Fourth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories. 23–23.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  28. Brent Roberts and Wendy DelVecchio. 2000. The Rank-Order Consistency of Personality Traits from Childhood to Old Age: A Quantitative Review of Longitudinal Studies. Psychological bulletin 126 (02 2000), 3–25.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  29. Jesus Salgado. 1997. The Five Factor Model of personality and job performance in the European community. Journal of Applied Psychology 82 (02 1997), 30–43.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  30. Norsaremah Salleh, Emilia Mendes, and John Grundy. 2014. Investigating the effects of personality traits on pair programming in a higher education setting through a family of experiments. Empirical Software Engineering 19, 3 (2014), 714–752.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  31. N. Salleh, E. Mendes, J. Grundy, and G. S. J. Burch. 2010. An empirical study of the effects of conscientiousness in pair programming using the five-factor personality model. In Proc. of International Conference on Software Engineering, Vol. 1. 577–586.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  32. S. S. SHAPIRO and M. B. WILK. 1965. An analysis of variance test for normality (complete samples). Biometrika 52, 3-4 (12 1965), 591–611.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  33. Edward K Smith, Christian Bird, and Thomas Zimmermann. 2016. Beliefs, practices, and personalities of software engineers: a survey in a large software company. In Proc. of the International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering. 15–18.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  34. C Spearman. 1904. The proof and measurement of association between two things. Am. J. Psychol. 15 (1904), 72–101.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  35. R. P. Tett, D. N. Jackson, and M. Rothstein. 1991. Personality Measures As Predictors Of Job Performance: A Meta-Analytic Review. Personnel Psychology 44, 4 (1991), 703–742.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  36. Sai Datta Vishnubhotla, Emilia Mendes, and Lars Lundberg. 2020. Investigating the relationship between personalities and agile team climate of software professionals in a telecom company. Information and Software Technology 126 (2020), 106335.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  37. X. Xia, D. Lo, L. Bao, A. Sharma, and S. Li. 2017. Personality and Project Success: Insights from a Large-Scale Study with Professionals. In Proc. of IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution. 318–328.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  38. Murat Yilmaz, Rory V. O’Connor, Ricardo Colomo-Palacios, and Paul Clarke. 2017. An examination of personality traits and how they impact on software development teams. Information and Software Technology 86 (2017), 101 – 122.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  39. Jerrold H Zar. 1972. Significance testing of the Spearman rank correlation coefficient. J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 67, 339 (1972), 578–580.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref

Recommendations

Comments

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Sign in
  • Published in

    cover image ACM Other conferences
    EASE '21: Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering
    June 2021
    417 pages
    ISBN:9781450390538
    DOI:10.1145/3463274

    Copyright © 2021 ACM

    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    • Published: 21 June 2021

    Permissions

    Request permissions about this article.

    Request Permissions

    Check for updates

    Qualifiers

    • research-article
    • Research
    • Refereed limited

    Acceptance Rates

    Overall Acceptance Rate71of232submissions,31%

PDF Format

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

HTML Format

View this article in HTML Format .

View HTML Format