Paper
Links Between the Personalities, Views and Attitudes of Software Engineers
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Successful software development and management depends not only on the technologies, methods and
processes employed but also on the judgments and decisions of the humans involved. These, in turn, are
affected by the basic views and attitudes of the individual engineers. The objective of this paper is to
establish if these views and attitudes can be linked to the personalities of software engineers. We summarize
the literature on personality and software engineering and then describe an empirical study on 47 professional
engineers in ten different Swedish software development companies. The study evaluated the personalities of
these engineers via the IPIP 50-item five-factor personality test and prompted them on their attitudes towards
and basic views on their professional activities. We present extensive statistical analyses of their responses to
show that there are multiple, significant associations between personality factors and software engineering
attitudes. The tested individuals are more homogeneous in personality than a larger sample of individuals
from the general population. Taken together, the methodology and personality test we propose and the
associated statistical analyses can help find and quantify relations between complex factors in software
engineering projects in both research and practice.
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Bibtex
@Article{Feldt2010SEPersonalities,
author = "Robert Feldt and Lefteris Angelis and Richard Torkar and Maria Samuelsson",
title = "Links between the personalities, views and attitudes of software engineers",
year = "2010",
month = "June",
journal = "Information and Software Technology",
volume = "52",
issue = "6",
pages = "611--624",
publisher = "Elsevier",
keywords = "Software Engineering; Human Factors; Personality",
keywords = "Attitudes; Empirical Study; Statistical Analysis",
url = "http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2010.01.001",
url = "http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~feldt/publications/feldt_2010_ist_sepersonalities.html",
url = "http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~feldt/publications/feldt_2010_ist_sepersonalities.pdf",
}
author = "Robert Feldt and Lefteris Angelis and Richard Torkar and Maria Samuelsson",
title = "Links between the personalities, views and attitudes of software engineers",
year = "2010",
month = "June",
journal = "Information and Software Technology",
volume = "52",
issue = "6",
pages = "611--624",
publisher = "Elsevier",
keywords = "Software Engineering; Human Factors; Personality",
keywords = "Attitudes; Empirical Study; Statistical Analysis",
url = "http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2010.01.001",
url = "http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~feldt/publications/feldt_2010_ist_sepersonalities.html",
url = "http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~feldt/publications/feldt_2010_ist_sepersonalities.pdf",
}