Linking Personality Traits and Interpersonal Skills to Gamification Awards

Abstract

Software repositories and Question & Answer sites constitute promising and ever-increasing sources of information for software analytics and for the identification of the role of the human factor in software engineering. Empirical evidence suggests that studying the human factor in software-related issues is multifaceted. Although analyses on different levels of developer networks have been performed, there is no existing work that moves beyond developer technical skills to take into account other important factors that might affect development work, such as personality and non-technical skills. For this reason, in this work we propose an approach that aims at finding links between badges – a sort of gamification awarded for developer's participation – personality traits, and interpersonal skills from Stack Overflow developers' community. The Generalized Linear Models (GLM) approach is adopted in order to examine the effects of personality traits and interpersonal skills on the non-technical awarded badges. Experimental results from the application of the proposed framework revealed statistically significant effects of both personality traits and interpersonal skills on the award gamification process.