On the Role of Personality Traits in Implementation Tasks: A Preliminary Investigation with Students

Abstract

The Software Engineering (SE) research community has been showing an increasing interest in peopleware, which refers to anything that has to do with the role of human factors in software development. Individuals’ personality is one of the human factors that can affect software development. In this paper, we present the results of a preliminary empirical study to understand whether there is a relationship between the personality traits (i.e., openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) and productivity of undergraduate students in Computer Science (CS), and internal quality of the programs they developed in an implementation task. In our study, we involved 30 (last-year) undergraduate students in CS, who had to implement a series of features. Our results suggest that there are correlation relationships between some personality traits (i.e., conscientiousness, extraversion, and neuroticism) and software quality. As for productivity, we could not find any correlation relationship.