Abstract
Human factors have an important effect on performance of software teams and resulting software products. One of the seldom-studied aspects of human factors is the effect of personality-based team formation on team cohesion and quality of the software product. In this study, we investigate the above effect by conducting an exploratory case study during a term-long undergraduate software engineering course containing a project component with 50 undergraduate students. We grouped the students based on the social-interaction dimension (introversion/ extraversion) of the well-known Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) personality assessment model. We then collected the relevant metrics to explore/analyze the two parameters of interest in our study: team cohesion, and project grade as an indicator of project output (i.e. resulting product quality). Our results show that there is some (although weak) relationship between the team formation scheme (based on either introversion or extraversion) with group performance and project grade. The results also show that mixed grouping of personality types has no significant effect on team cohesion but is advantageous in achieving higher project grades especially for people with low GPAs.
Highlights
Software Engineering (SE) is a team activity by nature, and human and social factors have a strong impact on the success of any SE endeavor and the software product developed by software teams [1]
Two Team Cohesion and Morale Index (TCMI) values for M0 for this group were reported. This did not lead to a negative effect on our case study since our group formation took into account academic success, and our design had a preventive nature against such occurrences as previously mentioned
We investigated the effect of personality-based team formation on team cohesion and project output
Summary
Software Engineering (SE) is a team activity by nature, and human and social factors have a strong impact on the success of any SE endeavor and the software product developed by software teams [1]. VAHID GAROUSI received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology (Iran) in 2000, and the University of Waterloo (Canada) 2003. He earned his PhD in Software Engineering in Carleton University (Canada) in 2006. He is currently an Associate Professor of Software Engineering in Wageningen University, the Netherlands. We focus on personality-based team formation as the independent variable and team cohesion and project output as dependent variables. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first one focusing on this particular combination of independent and dependent variables
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