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

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.