Relationships between Personality Traits and Productivity in a Multi-platform Development Context

Abstract

In this paper, we conduct an empirical study aiming at investigating how personality traits can affect the productivity of software developers in the context of the distributed development of multi-platform apps within a software project stored in GitHub. Participants were 31 master’s students in Computer Science grouped in 13 teams. Data were gathered from the compilation of the IPIP-NEO-120 questionnaire, a largely adopted tool to estimate personality traits, and from the software projects. We analyzed the correlation between personality traits (and their facets) and the productivity metrics. The results of this preliminary study seem to reveal that the most productive participants are those with the highest scores for the personality traits of Agreeableness and Conscientiousness.