The Type to Take Out a Loan? A Study of Developer Personality and Technical Debt

2023 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Technical Debt (TechDebt) Pub Date : 2023-03-03 DOI:10.1109/TechDebt59074.2023.00010

Lorenz Graf‐Vlachy, Stefan Wagner

{"title":"The Type to Take Out a Loan? A Study of Developer Personality and Technical Debt","authors":"Lorenz Graf‐Vlachy, Stefan Wagner","doi":"10.1109/TechDebt59074.2023.00010","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Background: Technical debt (TD) has been widely discussed in software engineering research, and there is an emerging literature linking it to developer characteristics. However, developer personality has not yet been studied in this context. Aims and Method: We explore the relationship between various personality traits (Five Factor Model, regulatory focus, and narcissism) of developers and the introduction and removal of TD. To this end, we complement an existing TD dataset with novel self-report personality data gathered by surveying developers, and analyze 2,145 commits from 19 developers. Results: We find that conscientiousness, emotional stability, openness to experience, and prevention focus are negatively associated with TD. There were no significant results for extraversion, agreeableness, promotion focus, or narcissism. Conclusions: We take our results as first evidence that developer personality has a systematic influence on the introduction and removal of TD. This has implications not only for future research, which could, for example, study the effects of personality on downstream consequences of TD like defects, but also for software engineering practitioners who may, for example, consider developer personality in staffing decisions.","PeriodicalId":131882,"journal":{"name":"2023 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Technical Debt (TechDebt)","volume":"105 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2023-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"2023 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Technical Debt (TechDebt)","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1109/TechDebt59074.2023.00010","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Abstract

Background: Technical debt (TD) has been widely discussed in software engineering research, and there is an emerging literature linking it to developer characteristics. However, developer personality has not yet been studied in this context. Aims and Method: We explore the relationship between various personality traits (Five Factor Model, regulatory focus, and narcissism) of developers and the introduction and removal of TD. To this end, we complement an existing TD dataset with novel self-report personality data gathered by surveying developers, and analyze 2,145 commits from 19 developers. Results: We find that conscientiousness, emotional stability, openness to experience, and prevention focus are negatively associated with TD. There were no significant results for extraversion, agreeableness, promotion focus, or narcissism. Conclusions: We take our results as first evidence that developer personality has a systematic influence on the introduction and removal of TD. This has implications not only for future research, which could, for example, study the effects of personality on downstream consequences of TD like defects, but also for software engineering practitioners who may, for example, consider developer personality in staffing decisions.

查看原文本刊更多论文

申请贷款的类型?开发者个性与技术债务研究

背景:技术债务(TD)在软件工程研究中被广泛讨论，并且有一个新兴的文献将其与开发人员特征联系起来。然而，开发者的个性还没有在这种背景下进行研究。目的与方法:探讨开发人员的各种人格特征(五因素模型、监管焦点和自恋)与TD的引入和消除之间的关系。为此，我们用调查开发者收集的新的自我报告人格数据补充了现有的TD数据集，并分析了来自19个开发者的2145份提交。结果:尽责性、情绪稳定性、经验开放性和预防重点与TD呈负相关。在外向性、宜人性、晋升焦点或自恋方面没有显著的结果。结论:我们将研究结果作为开发者个性对TD引入和移除具有系统性影响的第一个证据。这不仅对未来的研究有影响，例如，研究人格对TD(如缺陷)的下游结果的影响，而且对软件工程从业者也有影响，例如，在人员配置决策中考虑开发人员的人格。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

求助全文

约1分钟内获得全文求助全文

来源期刊

2023 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Technical Debt (TechDebt)

自引率

0.00%

发文量