Towards individualized software engineering: empirical studies should collect psychometrics
by R. Feldt, R. Torkar, L. Angelis and M. Samuelsson
PDF
Even though software is developed by humans, research in software engineering primarily focuses on the technologies, methods and processes they use while disregarding the importance of the humans themselves. In this paper we argue that most studies in software engineering should give much more weight to human factors. In particular empirical software engineering studies involving human developers should always consider collecting psychometric data on the humans involved. We focus on personality as one important psychometric factor and present initial results from an empirical study investigating correlations between personality and attitudes to software engineering processes and tools. We discuss what are currently hindering a more wide-spread use of psychometrics and how overcoming these hurdles could lead to a more individualized software engineering.
Bibtex
@InProceedings{Feldt2008ESEPsychometrics,
author = "Robert Feldt and Richard Torkar and Lefteris Angelis and Maria Samuelsson",
title = "Towards individualized software engineering: empirical studies should collect psychometrics",
year = "2008",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2008 International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE'08)",
pages = "49--52",
keywords = "Software Engineering; Empirical study; Psychology; Human factors; Psychometrics",
url = "http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~feldt/publications/feldt_2008_psychometrics_in_ese.html",
}