Building Most Effective Requirements Engineering Teams by Evaluating Their Personality Traits Using Big-Five Assessment Model

Abstract

The requirement engineering team plays a vital role in alignment of software development in accordance with intended user requirements. The requirements engineering is considered as the most social and interactive process within the software development life cycle. The strong social and collaborative nature of RE process highlights and justifies its primary dependence on personality attributes/traits of its participants like requirements analysts and product stakeholders. The induction of right persons with right personality traits for RE teams greatly affects their work performance and consequently contributes positively in the improvement of whole software development process. This article presents a method to build most effective RE teams by considering their personality traits at the time of their induction. The job descriptions and soft skills announced by software industry for hiring requirements engineers have been analyzed critically and accordingly the most suitable personality traits have been predicted using a systematic method. The devised method initially maps different soft skills required to perform different tasks during RE phase and then re-maps desired soft skills with personality traits of software engineers. The big-five (also known as five-factor) personality assessment model has traditionally been used to identify the most suitable personalities for RE teamwork due to its wide acceptance in the software engineering domain. The obtained results show that the personality traits of openness, extraversion and conscientiousness are the most suitable personality traits for requirements engineering team members to perform RE tasks. These results are very much aligned with already established findings in domain of personality assessment of software engineering roles, which advocates the accuracy of devised method.