No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
The Effect of Software Engineers’ Personality traits on Team Climate and Performance: a Systematic Literature Review
Abstract
Context: Over the past 50 years numerous studies have investigated the possible effect that software engineers’ personalities may have upon their individual tasks and teamwork. These have led to an improved understanding of that relationship; however, the analysis of personality traits and their impact on the software development process is still an area under investigation and debate. Further, other than personality traits, “team climate” is also another factor that has also been investigated given its relationship with software teams’ performance.
... Several factors can influence the organizational climate of agile software development teams, such as trust, openness, respect, team engagement, a culture of action and change, innovation, leadership, communication, personality, software quality, performance, support from management and the availability of resources for the project [2,18,36,40,46]. Curtis et al. [10] propose that organizations should periodically identify the opinion of each person on their working conditions. ...
... Other studies [36,40] only present factors that exert some influence on the organizational climate of agile teams. ...
... There are several studies on organizational climate in software development teams [40]. However, many of these studies do not report characteristics of the software development process considered in the evaluated teams. ...
... However, we noted that many SLRs (see Table 11) in our set used either publisher or indexing databases only. Few studies have used Google and Google-Scholar, mostly (e.g., [56,58,62,61,52]) used it in combination with other databases, while in one case (i.e. [50]) the authors have only used Google and Google-Scholar for search. ...
... • Pilot searches or iterative search refinement process [72,65,67,56] • Previous SLR [47,52] • Manual analysis/review of relevant papers on the topic [48,62,66,59,63] • Keywords validated by searching databases [49] • Quasi-gold standard [64] • Keywords reviewed by an experienced researcher [61] • To limit the scope of the SLR, a term was introduced [51] • Relevant literature [68] Only eight SLRs [48,66,57,72,51,64,67,73] performed pilot or trial searches, which is a recommended step in the SLR guidelines. Three SLRs [65,68,56] stated that they performed the pilot searches or followed an iterative search refinement process, but no further details were provided. ...
... Regarding reporting of the search results, 15 SLRs [48,49,71,57,58,51,59,60,52,53,64,54,65,67,55] reported search results for each database, while 11 SLRs [47,66,56,72,50,61,62,63,68,73,69] reported only the total results. One SLR [70] that used snowballing search method alone reported the number of candidate and final primary studies for each iteration of the backward and forward snowballing. ...
Context
The trust in systematic literature reviews (SLRs) to provide credible recommendations is critical for establishing evidence-based software engineering (EBSE) practice. The reliability of SLR as a method is not a given and largely depends on the rigor of the attempt to identify, appraise and aggregate evidence. Previous research, by comparing SLRs on the same topic, has identified search as one of the reasons for discrepancies in the included primary studies. This affects the reliability of an SLR, as the papers identified and included in it are likely to influence its conclusions.
Objective
We aim to propose a comprehensive evaluation checklist to assess the reliability of an automated-search strategy used in an SLR.
Method
Using a literature review, we identified guidelines for designing and reporting automated-search as a primary search strategy. Using the aggregated design, reporting and evaluation guidelines, we formulated a comprehensive evaluation checklist. The value of this checklist was demonstrated by assessing the reliability of search in 27 recent SLRs.
Results
Using the proposed evaluation checklist, several additional issues (not captured by the current evaluation checklist) related to the reliability of search in recent SLRs were identified. These issues severely limit the coverage of literature by the search and also the possibility to replicate it.
Conclusion
Instead of solely relying on expensive replications to assess the reliability of SLRs, this work provides means to objectively assess the likely reliability of a search-strategy used in an SLR. It highlights the often-assumed aspect of repeatability of search when using automated-search. Furthermore, by explicitly considering repeatability and consistency as sub-characteristics of a reliable search, it provides a more comprehensive evaluation checklist than the ones currently used in EBSE.
... Motivation [1,2,7,15,21] and Personality [4,5,11,22,44] were the main research topic in ten studies. Beecham et al. [7] analyze that Motivation is difficult to measure. ...
... The Team Climate influence ( Table 4) represents factors that can be defined as a combination of its team members' interactions to share their perceptions of the team's work procedures and practices [44]. Soomro et al. [44] investigated several factors that influence the Team Climate. ...
... The Team Climate influence ( Table 4) represents factors that can be defined as a combination of its team members' interactions to share their perceptions of the team's work procedures and practices [44]. Soomro et al. [44] investigated several factors that influence the Team Climate. The authors reported that Collaboration, Cooperation, Coordination, Collective Thinking, and Cohesion can potentially influence the Organizational Climate of the team. ...
... The organisational climate assessment allows the capturing of the perception, satisfaction, or preferences of the development team in terms of their working conditions. A negative organisational climate can have adverse effects on software development team members about aspects such as motivation, the ability to make good decisions, and willingness to innovate while also affecting a project's success [9,10]. Considering Agile teams, organisational climate assessments allow, for instance, to identify ineffectiveness of leadership, measure the autonomy, collaboration, or communication of the team, identify the lack of support from the various levels of management, notice inconsistencies in the use of ceremonies, and capture the teams' preferences among the various existing practices or tools etc. ...
... There is a gap in the literature regarding the investigation on how organisational climate assessments apply to Agile teams, how the process is, how the instruments are, what the benefits or difficulties are. The majority of the studies have focused on investigating factors that influence the organisational climate of development teams in general [10]. ...
... Many studies have investigated organisational climates in software development teams [10]. Many of the studies published, however, consider the teams without mentioning the base of the development process and utilise climate assessment models of a general nature. ...
Agile methods are associated with values, principles, and practices that influence organisational climate. Organisational climate is the meaning employees attach to the policies, practices, and procedures they experience and the behaviours they observe getting rewarded, supported, and expected. A negative climate can influence team members on aspects such as motivation, ability to make good decisions, and willingness to innovate. Conversely, a positive climate can influence project success and the competitiveness of organisations. The authors investigate how organisations considered assessing the organisational climate of Agile teams, and which are the benefits and the difficulties associated with this assessment. They conducted a qualitative study on five Brazilian organisations. They interviewed key personnel involved with organisational climate assessments. They identified 16 benefits and nine difficulties of organisational climate assessments. Based on the results and the literature, they formulated two propositions representing pitfalls that can hinder organisational climate assessments of Agile teams. Organisations should use instruments adapted to the Agile culture to improve the ability to diagnose the organisational climate and involve the Agile team in the climate management activities to ease the identification of the team's perception about project performance and product quality indicators.
... Cruz et al. aimed at summarizing the different ways of measuring and assessing the personality of the software developers [5], [6]. Soomro et al. [7] analyzed the impact of personality on different aspects of the software production, such as the team climate, and the individual and the team performance. A broader analysis of the factors impacting on software productivity was conducted by Oliveira et al. [8]. ...
... Cluster 1 seems to be more focused on the software development process as the words "software", "development", "engineering" "team", "projects" and "process" seem to suggest. For instance, "The impact of human factors on the participation decision of reviewers in modern code review" [19], "The effect of software engineers' personality traits on team climate and performance: A Systematic Literature Review" [7], "QUASE -A quantitative approach to analyze the human aspects of software development projects" [20]. Contrary to Cluster 0, these papers do not have the software product as their target, but the professional figures who develop software and how the improvements of human factors aspects and, consequently, the improvement of team performance, could increase software quality and productivity. ...
Human Factors (HF) is the study of the interaction between users and technology with the aim of improving the user’s experience of a product and avoid unwanted issues in the usage of the system. HF is largely applied in several fields such as industrial processes, education, training, and design. In software development, HF plays a crucial role in the efficient and effective development of a software product and the success of the final product. This paper aims at indicating the state of the art of the literature on HF in software, in general and in the software development process in particular. To do so, a preliminary literature review using text mining has been performed. This work gathered papers using the terms “human factors” and “software” from four of the most used scientific digital databases (ACM DL, Scopus, Science Direct and IEEE Xplore). A total of 2192 papers were selected and automatically gathered into three clusters by using the X-means algorithm, which automatically recommended that number of clusters. The results show that there are three main areas where HF have been researched within software development: (1) the field of product evaluation (user experience) (2) the field of software development process, especially in the project management processes (3) the field of education. The results are an initial indication of the evolution of research in this area and where and how HF is applied in software engineering.
... However, little has been done to evaluate the extent to which physical and mental challenges are properly addressed in engineering software development, and is also poorly supported in practice. Per-sonality, team climate and organisational issues relating to people have been heavily researched in Management, Information Systems, and the personality of programmers and testers in software development (Pikkarainen et al., 2008;Soomro et al., 2016). However, little attention has been paid to how to go about supporting differing personality, team climate or organisational or user culture in software, nor to capture requirements relating to these human-centric issues. ...
... The taxonomy will be tested on real-world example requirements to gain feedback from both developers and end users to demonstrate its effectiveness. We are drawing on our extensive previous work developing taxonomies for design critics , emotion-oriented requirements (Curumsing et al., 2019), usability defects (Yusop et al., 2016), and team climate (Soomro et al., 2016). ...
... Teachers with high openness traits had rich imagination, hobby diversity, strong curiosity, independent thinking, and no prejudice, so people with high openness will tend to have creative teaching (Rodrigues and Rebelo, 2013). People with high agreeableness traits were more courteous, supple, kind, cooperative, easy to trust others, tolerate others, and willing to share their views and impart their knowledge with others, so the willingness to carry out creative teaching was high (Hiedanpää, 2005;Soomro et al., 2016). People with higher scores in conscientiousness were more independent, cautious, self-conscious, and perseverant, so the higher the degree of conscientiousness, the higher the degree of creative teaching (Whaite et al., 2018). ...
... From the determinant coefficient R 2 value of the regression equation, the influence of personality traits on "interactive discussion, " "open-mindedness, " "problem-solving, " "multiple teaching, " and "autonomous learning" was 46.92, 43.82, 45.96, 48.16, and 41.34%, respectively. These results also support some views of some scholars (Rodrigues and Rebelo, 2013;Chernyavskaya and Samoylichenko, 2016) but were inconsistent with other views (Soomro et al., 2016;Whaite et al., 2018). For example, the present study found that "conscientiousness" had no significant effect on the five dimensions of creative teaching, which seemed difficult to obtain an explanation. ...
The investigation has been carried out on the status quo of higher school physical education teachers’ personality traits, resilience, and creative teaching status. The exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, combined with multiple stratified linear regression analysis, were used to verify the data obtained by the structure model. The results show that (1) among the big five personality traits, excepting conscientiousness, the rest of the four dimension personality traits have different influences on creative teaching; (2) extraversion, agreeableness, and openness can produce an intermediary effect on innovative teaching through different dimensions of resilience; (3) the school support has a positive influence on five aspects of the creative teaching; and (4) problem cognition and empathy in resilience play a multilevel role of mediating effect and are regulated variables as well. The findings of the present study revealed that the key to success to creative teaching is to understand teachers’ personality traits, pay attention to the resilience of the development of teachers’ creative teaching, and provide required support; the higher the awareness of the problem and the degree of school support in the resilience was, the higher the problem solving and the higher degree of teaching in the creative teaching tended to be.
... We addressed the issue of bias in study selection through comprehensive searching from search databases commonly used in existing SLRs (e.g. [87]). The procedure that we adopted in this study follows the guidelines of Kitchenham et al. [10], which helps to minimise the possibility of missing evidence. ...
... In the case of IEEE Xplore, it is clearly mentioned that the maximum number of search terms is 15. Hence, to overcome this issue, we created several sub-strings, which were executed separately and the results from each execution was recorded and then accumulated [87]. Our search was organised as a multi-step process including manual and automatic searches. ...
Context
Scheduling in cloud is complicated as a result of multi-tenancy. Diverse tenants have different requirements, including service functions, response time, QoS and throughput. Diverse tenants require different scheduling capabilities, resource consumption and competition. Multi-tenancy scheduling approaches have been developed for different service models, such as Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Database as a Service (DBaaS).
Objective
In this paper, we survey the current landscape of multi-tenancy scheduling, laying out the challenges and complexity of software engineering where multi-tenancy issues are involved. This study emphasises scheduling policies, cloud provisioning and deployment with regards to multi-tenancy issues. We conduct a systematic literature review of research studies related to multi-tenancy scheduling approaches on cloud platforms determine the primary scheduling approaches currently used and the challenges for addressing key multi-tenancy scheduling issues.
Method
We adopted a systematic literature review method to search and review many major journal and conference papers on four major online electronic databases, which address our four predefined research questions. Defining inclusion and exclusion criteria was the initial step before extracting data from the selected papers and deriving answers addressing our enquiries.
Results
Finally, 53 papers were selected, of which 62 approaches were identified. Most of these methods are developed without cloud layers’ limitation (43.40%) and on SaaS, most of scheduling approaches are oriented to framework design (43.75%).
Conclusion
The results have demonstrated most of multi-tenancy scheduling solutions can work at any delivery layer. With the difference of tenants’ requirements and functionalities, the choice of cloud service delivery models is changed. Based on our study, designing a multi-tenancy scheduling framework should consider the following 3 factors: computing, QoS and storage resource. One of the potential research foci of multi-tenancy scheduling approaches is on GPU scheduling.
... Collaboration is integral to task planning and execution in GSD, but temporal distance limits it (Bannerman et al. 2012;Gomes and Marczak 2012;Lindsjørn et al. 2016;Richardson et al. 2012;Soomro et al. 2016). It is difficult to find and collaborate with relevant stakeholders due to spatial distance (Gomes and Marczak 2012;Korkala and Maurer 2014;Nguyen-Duc et al. 2015;Shrivastava and Rathod 2017;Vizcaíno et al. 2016). ...
... Communication is used to relay task-relevant information. Collaboration is for planning development activities (Lindsjørn et al. 2016;Richardson et al. 2012;Soomro et al. 2016) while coordination is for managing interdependent tasks; ensuring the performance of plans by relaying details of how tasks must be executed (Gopal et al. 2011;Nguyen-Duc et al. 2015). Despite having distinct usage, these concepts aim to transmit information, thru interaction with participants with little to no delay. ...
Global Software Development (GSD) refers to distributed software development in form of offshore insourcing and outsourcing. GSD promises benefits like cost-saving, time to market reduction, access to global talents, and task modularization. However, GSD encounters issues caused by team separation which has five dimensions: geographical, temporal, cultural, organizational, and work. These issues affect GSD activities. Issues reported in GSD are greater than identified solutions. Thus, it can be inferred that GSD lacks a guide on how it should be done (planned and implemented). This study aims to build a framework using open-ended inductive theory building method, to explain why GSD fail (due to team separation), and how it can succeed. The framework will be grounded in Process Virtualization, Task-Technology Fit, and Transactive Memory theories. This study will use the case study approach under phenomenological research of qualitative design to understand the phenomenon thru experiences of participants, and processes involved.
... They found that teamwork has a positive effect on team performance (rated by team members and leaders) and team members' learning and work satisfaction (rated by team members). Soomro et al. 13 conducted a literature review and found that the characteristics of a project team have a significant effect on team performance. ...
... The Q 2 for benevolence trust beliefs was .35; the Q 2 for competence trust beliefs was .41; the Q 2 for integrity trust beliefs was .51; the Q 2 for social influence was .17; the Q 2 for autonomous motivation was .24; the Q 2 for controlled motivation was .15; the Q 2 for programming effort was .13; the Q 2 for programming skills was .16; the Q 2 for collaboration skills was . 13. Therefore, our model had good predictive relevance overall. ...
Organizations increasingly use virtual teams to support their business processes. With software development as its context, this study aims to examine how software engineers are motivated to work in virtual teams, as well as the subsequent impacts this has on their programming and collaboration skills development. A theoretical model was developed based on self-determination theory. Data were collected from longitudinal surveys taken by software engineers in China. Our research results show that trust is positively related to software engineers’ autonomous motivation, whereas social influence is positively related to their controlled motivation. Besides, autonomous motivation enhances the amount of effort software engineers put into programming, whereas controlled motivation does not. Programming effort, in turn, increases their programming and collaboration skills. These research findings can advance our understanding about software engineers’ motivations in the context of software development. Our work also has important implications for organizations and software engineers. © 2019, © 2019 International Association for Computer Information Systems.
... However, little has been done to evaluate the extent to which physical and mental challenges are properly addressed in engineering software development, and is also poorly supported in practice. Personality, team climate and organisational issues relating to people have been heavily researched in Management, Information Systems, and the personality of programmers and testers in software development [46,55]. However, little attention has been paid to how to go about supporting differing personality, team climate or organisational or user culture in software, nor to capture requirements relating to these human aspects. ...
... The taxonomy is being tested on real-world example requirements to gain feedback from both developers and end users to demonstrate its effectiveness. We are drawing on our extensive previous work developing taxonomies for design critics [2], emotion-oriented requirements [7], usability defects [62], and team climate [55]. ...
A common problem with many existing software systems and the approaches to engineering them is their lack of the human aspects of their target end users. People are different - with diverse characteristics including age, gender, ethnicity, physical and mental challenges, personality, technical proficiency, emotional reactions to software systems, socio-economic status, educational attainment, language, and so on. In this paper we describe our work at looking to better consider these characteristics by incorporation of human aspects throughout the software engineering lifecycle. We are developing a co-creational living lab approach to better collect human aspects in the software requirements. We are using domain-specific visual languages, themselves a more human-centric modelling approach, to capture these diverse human aspects of target software systems. We are working on incorporating these human aspects into design models to support improved model-driven engineering, and thereby to better support both code generation and run-time adaptation to different end user human characteristics. Finally we are working on better ways to support continuous evaluation of human aspects in the produced software, and to provide improved feedback of user reported defects to developers.
... La lista de verificación para la evaluación de la calidad elaborada se basa en la lista de verificación sugerida en Kitchenham y Charters (2007). Otros trabajos sobre revisiones sistemáticas y mapeo de la literatura (Neiva, David, Braga y Campos, 2016;Soomro et al., 2016; Cruz-Benito, García-Peñalvo y Therón, 2019) también personalizan sus listas de control de calidad basándose en las sugerencias dadas en (Kitchenham y Charters, 2007). ...
La Analítica del Aprendizaje (proveniente del término en inglés Learning Analytics) procesa los datos de los estudiantes, incluso los estudiantes menores de edad. El ciclo analítico consiste en recoger datos, almacenarlos durante largos períodos y utilizarlos para realizar análisis y visualizaciones. A mayor cantidad de datos, mejores resultados en el análisis. Este análisis puede ser descriptivo, predictivo e, incluso, prescriptivo, lo que implica la gestión, el tratamiento y la utilización de datos personales. El contexto educativo es, por lo tanto, muy sensible, a diferencia de los contextos individuales en los que el análisis se utiliza a voluntad. No está claro cómo están utilizando los datos de los estudiantes las empresas de tecnología que dan servicio en educación y a quiénes realmente se les beneficia, cómo esto afectará a los estudiantes en un futuro a corto y largo plazo, o qué nivel de privacidad o seguridad se aplica para proteger los datos de los estudiantes. Por consiguiente, y en relación con lo expuesto, el análisis de datos educativos implica un contexto sensible y de fragilidad en la gestión y análisis de datos personales de los estudiantes, incluidos menores, en el que hay que maximizar las precauciones. En esta revisión sistemática de la literatura se explora la importancia de la protección y seguridad de los datos personales en el campo de la educación mediante las promesas emergentes de los interesados en usar la tecnología blockchain. Los resultados denotan que es importante entender las implicaciones y riesgos derivados de usar tecnologías emergentes en educación, su relación con la sociedad y la legalidad vigente.
... Based on many literature reviews, researchers of well-being focus more on the use and effects of software products (e.g., mobile apps, social media, and computer games) rather than the experience of people who create these products [9][10][11][12][13][14][15]. Furthermore, reviews in software development focus on psychological factors other than well-being, such as communication [16][17][18], personality [19][20][21][22], and motivation [23][24][25][26]. However, to the best of my knowledge, there are no published systematic reviews on the well-being of software developers. ...
Context: Organizational studies show that well-being contributes to various work outcomes, including creativity, performance, and productivity. However, the multidimensional well-being of software developers is still an underresearched topic due to the limited focus, demography, methodology, theory, and results of software engineering studies. Objective: This paper encourages more advanced quantitative studies on the well-being of professional software developers by reviewing the present literature on the topic and providing a theoretical model based on the systematically reviewed empirical studies. Method: A systematic literature review was adopted to review 31 quantitative survey studies published between 2000 and 2021, while the analytical part of the grounded theory literature review was used to construct the theoretical model. Results: 10,652 professional software developers from at least 830 companies, 588 teams/projects, and 34 countries constitute the total sample. The studies were mostly published in IT-related journals between 2015 and 2019, mainly by American and German authors. Cross-sectional designs, SEM and regression techniques, and original measures were mostly used to study various constructs and indicators of well-being. The quality is good to very good. Conclusion: The well-being of software developers emerged as a meta-construct of hedonic, eudaimonic, and multidimensional well-being predicted by different individual and organizational factors and impacting the health of software developers and their organizations. The review confirmed the need for more advanced quantitative studies of software developers' well-being.
... According to that, numerous researches indicated the correlation between the employees" personality and various forms of organizational behavior. Relations between personality and business performances (Conte et al., 2017;Judge & Zapata, 2015) and team performances (Park et al., 2017;Soomro et al., 2016) are subjects for analyzing the problems of correlation between the employees" personality and organizational outcomes. The "Big Five" theory of personality dimensions is one of the widely used theories when researching these relations. ...
Awareness regarding the increasing importance of human resources for achieving the organizational competitiveness on the market became an integral part of modern economy, where people, together with their knowledge and skills, represent strategic organizational resource. The aim of this research is to assess the influence of employees’ personality dimensions, according to the ‘Big Five’ theory, and certain facets of job satisfaction as well as different facets of job satisfaction on the overall assessment of job satisfaction. The influence of respondents’ socio-demographic characteristics on the individual facets of job satisfaction is also evaluated. The research results indicated that there is a significant difference in the assessment of individual facets of job satisfaction regarding the respondents’ demographic characteristics. Also, statistically significant correlations are found between personality dimensions: ‘Extraversion’, ‘Openness to new experiences’, ‘Conscientiousness’, ‘Agreeableness’ and ‘Neuroticism’ and individual facets of job satisfaction. The research results will be beneficial for providing the appropriate guidelines for improvement of human resource management of large organizations, especially in the case of public-owned organizations within the countries facing significant restructuring changes, such as Serbia.
... Personality and software development has long been studied [8]. We have been interested in several aspects of this problem: personality and its impact on different phases of development, specifically software testing [29]; personality and its impact on learning pair-programming [30]; personality and its impact on requirements engineering [31]; and personality and its impact on teams and organisations [32]. These have shown that different aspects of software activity can be significantly impacted by different developer, pair, and team personalities. ...
Humans are a key part of software development,
including customers, designers, coders, testers and end users.
In this keynote talk I explain why incorporating human-centric
issues into software engineering for next-generation applications
is critical. I use several examples from our recent and current
work on handling human-centric issues when engineering various
‘smart living’ cloud- and edge-based software systems. This
includes using human-centric, domain-specific visual models for
non-technical experts to specify and generate data analysis
applications; personality impact on aspects of software activities;
incorporating end user emotions into software requirements engineering for smart homes; incorporating human usage patterns
into emerging edge computing applications; visualising smart
city-related data; reporting diverse software usability defects; and
human-centric security and privacy requirements for smart living
systems. I assess the usefulness of these approaches, highlight
some outstanding research challenges, and briefly discuss our
current work on new human-centric approaches to software
engineering for smart living applications.
... They have established that the higher levels of satisfaction can only be accomplished when the group associates can make decision on developments and organisation of assignments. The influence of software engineers' personality traits on group environment and efficiency: A well-organised literature review is completed by Soomro et al. [23] in which they observed few factors that may be beneficial for investing the achievement as well as chances of failure of software assignments in development. ...
... They have established that the higher levels of satisfaction can only be accomplished when the group associates can make decision on developments and organisation of assignments. The influence of software engineers' personality traits on group environment and efficiency: A well-organised literature review is completed by Soomro et al. [23] in which they observed few factors that may be beneficial for investing the achievement as well as chances of failure of software assignments in development. ...
... The Big Five model is often used as a basis for measurement of personality predictors of the effectiveness of actions taken by various organisations (i.e. not only NGOs), including their potential to collaborate with other entities (Hassan et al. 2017, p. 75;Soomro et al. 2016). ...
Collaboration between non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and public institutions, in accordance with the new public governance model, may contribute to actions by such organisations on behalf of both the co-production and co-construction of social services. The aim of this article is to assess the role of selected traits of NGO leaders in determining the chances of collaboration between NGOs and rural gmina offices in central, post-socialist Poland. The authors present the results of studies on selected subjective determinants of such collaboration, in which 104 leaders of NGOs from 29 rural gminas participated. Five independent research tools were implemented. Logistic regression analysis was used to assess the role of selected traits of NGO leaders in determining the potential for collaboration between NGOs and rural gmina offices. The final model indicates that the potential for collaboration between an NGO and a rural gmina office increases alongside higher levels of education, social competences and locus of control and decreased control ideology among NGO leaders. On this basis, the authors formulate practical conclusions concerning the education of leaders of rural NGOs in post-socialist Poland.
... Personality is the "characteristic patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior together with the psychological mechanismshidden or notbehind those patterns" [11] and is a topic of interest in the computer science literature [12]. Studies have focused on the influence of personality on pair programming [13], team climate, and performance [14]. Although research has explored the effects of personality on software development, no research has explored how personality affects psychological trust in software systems. ...
The daily use of technology has made people ever more reliant on software. It is important these software systems are produced in a manner that is both efficient and secure. In this context, psychological trust of software is a pertinent aspect of research. The present study explored the relationship of trustworthiness ratings, propensity to trust, and trait suspicion on software reuse. In addition, we explored personality as a moderator of the trustworthiness-reuse relationship, as hypothesized in the interpersonal trust literature [1]. We recruited participants from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and requested they assess classes of Java code. Analyses revealed trait suspicion influenced decisions to reuse code and moderated the trustworthiness-trust relationship. A dual-process model of information processing was adopted for interpretation of these effects. Implications include contributions to research and theory on psychological trust, as well as practical implications for personnel selection with regard to software production.
... Several studies have been conducted to understand personality types in software engineering [27][28][29][30]. Moreover, a number of studies attempted to investigate the possible effects of personalities may have upon individual and team performances [31][32][33]. ...
The social aspects of software development encompass concerns such as motivating practitioners, building effective teams, and developing personal relations. Not surprisingly, perhaps, many software projects fail due to personality conflicts within team members. This study investigates the personality traits of 132 software practitioners by employing a tailored interactive assessment that was specifically developed for software development organizations. To assess the personality characteristics of the software teams as a whole, the results of 20 project teams were visualized by using personality–team radar charts. The validity part of the study was performed through validation interviews with experts from the field, discussing their experiences using the interactive assessment. The findings of this investigation complement those of earlier studies that suggest that productive team members who were working on social isolation showed higher introversion. In particular, this study strengthens the idea that agreeableness was observed in agile teams. Ultimately, the present data also highlight the existence of conscientiousness personalities in agile software development.
... Personality and gender have been explored in social sciences, but problems of teamwork in organizations and gender are still not well understood in software development [9]. A recent systematic literature review on software engineers' personality traits found that only two studies consider gender and gender diversity when studying team climate and performance [10]. Literature that does explicitly investigate gender diversity in software engineering (e.g., [11]- [13]) offers an "external view" on the impact of gender diversity (i.e., how diversity contributes to productivity or innovation). ...
... Each team has its own environment, which reflects the concept of sharing of ideas and attitudes between team members to encourage workflow and for achieving group viability (Soomro, Salleh, Mendes, Grundy, Burch, & Nordin, 2016). According to Mannix and Jehn (2014), social processes reflect interactions between members, while team atmosphere reflects members' attitudes about the group's environmental characteristics, such as the level of respect that has evolved and the members' commitment to each other. ...
... Although both of these studies of the group selection problem in industrial management, with the aim of dealing with personal interests according to the needs of their times, do not deal with the identical problems of choice facing the collective interest in public management, the truth revealed by them is the same [1]. Mayo's Factory Human Relationship Theory tells us that, even if individuals pursue their own interests under formal institutional arrangements, they are not fully free but will be constrained by stakeholder groups and need to recognize these [2]. Despite such constraint and that this recognition is informal, it is very effective. ...
Collective action is a basic premise for the effective protection of open public resources. The characteristics and the environment of open public resources, however, also constitute many “bottlenecks” to collective action, which means that there is a “paradoxical” relationship between collective action and open public resources. Therefore, the key to protecting open public resources is to construct a collective action mechanism that can break these “bottlenecks”. In the case of three different forms of contract system implemented by Yongjia County, Zhejiang Province, China for the fishery resources of Nanxi River, the first two contracts were caught up in the “tragedy of the commons” and a legality crisis because they did not form a collective action mechanism to protect resources. The sub-contract with the aim of protecting and resting the Nanxi River started in 2005 and has constructed a collective action mechanism of consensus, sharing, common participation, joint discussion and co-management, and worked out a rationale of how to form collective action in the process of open public resource protection, which is worth exploring and promoting. This study aims to explore the bottlenecks which limit collective action in the process of resource protection, and to provide practical policy recommendation for solving them.
... Therefore, there needs to be an adjustment to the type of work, one of which is to pay attention to personality factors (Capretz et al., 2015). Personality in teamwork affects performance (Soomro et al., 2016). HR performance is seen as important for the organization. ...
Identification of personality types is one of the activities commonly carried out by organizations to select human resources (HR). The personality type is adjusted to the job description that must be done by the selected individual. Maximum individual performance is the reason why personality tests are needed by organizations. The personality test method commonly used is to get a response in the form of a written answer from a questionnaire. Another method is proposed which takes into account individual facial expressions. Both methods use an iterative process to achieve consistency in individual responses. The repetition process is carried out with a limited frequency and the implementation takes a long time. This limited frequency has the potential to cause errors in inferring personality types. Inconsistent responses from individuals identified with personality types make the reliability level of personality tests less than optimal. Reliability that is not optimal can have a negative impact on decision-making in the selection of selected human resources. Based on these problems, this study proposes the use of electroencephalography (EEG) to confirm individual personality types. The EEG used is a stimulated wave because the individual sees a visual form known as Visual Evoked Potential (VEP). Visual stimulus is the user interface design of a job support application. The stimulus is generated with a lot of frequency so that it can be relied on in knowing the consistent response. It is hoped that the recorded VEP pattern will reach a very good permanent level. An excellent permanent VEP rate can be determined by comparing between recording sessions. The permanent level of the VEP becomes the actual individual VEP. VEP comparisons between individuals will be compared for the classification process. The resulting classification is expected to show that individual VEP corresponds to each individual's personality type from the results of personality tests carried out by conventional methods.
... Human aspects in software engineering are considered as human-related aspects that can become make-or-break issues in software projects [25]. Researchers have investigated human aspects such as personality [8] [10], emotions [12], motivation [48] [20], gender [42], culture [44], communication issues [15] [6], human errors [5], attitude [18], team climate [47] and others in various SE contexts and identified their impact on SE for better or worse. From the systematic literature review (SLR) we recently conducted [25], we identified that human aspects, and their impact on RE-related activities are still an area with relatively limited attention. ...
Requirements Engineering (RE) is a process that requires high collaboration between various roles in software engineering (SE), such as requirements engineers, stakeholders, developers, etc. Their demographics, views, understanding of technologies, working styles, communication and collaboration capabilities make RE highly human dependent. Identifying how human aspects such as motivation, domain knowledge, communication skills, personality, emotions, culture, etc might impact RE would help us to improve the RE activities and SE in general. The aim of this study is to understand current industry perspectives on the influence of human aspects on RE. We surveyed 111 software practitioners involved in RE activities, and our findings show that 86.4% of participants agree, that the success of RE greatly depends on the people involved in it. Software practitioners consider motivation, domain knowledge, attitude, communication skills and personality as highly important human aspects when involved in RE. A set of factors, we categorize as human/social and technical were identified as software practitioners motivation factors when involved in RE activities, where the majority of are motivated due to human/social factors. Furthermore, our findings suggest that software practitioners personality characteristics should also be paid more attention to as they are important when conducting RE effectively.
Context: Sentiment Analysis applies computational techniques for both automated and semi-automated identification of human behavior. There is a trend to use such techniques in Sentiment Analysis tasks in the Software Engineering context. Objective: Characterize the influence of developers sentiments on software practices and artifacts in open source software projects. Methods: We conducted a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to identify references in the literature related to the influence of developers sentiments on software practices and artifacts. Results: Evidence showed an increasing number of studies in this theme shedding light on issues related to the influence of developers sentiments on software practices. Practices focusing on developers productivity and collaboration, as well as source code, are the most vulnerable to sentiments variation. Conclusions: Based on the results provided in this SLR, we intend to present an updated and comprehensive overview regarding how the sentiments of developers can positively or negatively impact software practices and artifacts.
The approach by most universities in pitching team-based projects at senior undergraduate level as a learning and assessment tool can be considerably risky for student success, especially if a student discovers only in their final year of study, that they overestimated the command of their soft skills, potentially leading to them failing the project. This paper reports on an initiative aimed at minimizing this risk by introducing the concept of teamwork earlier in the curriculum, particularly, at first-year level, rather than allowing senior students to be blindsided at the later and (far more) crucial stage. This approach is meant to encourage students to explore interactions with one another, identifying potential shortcomings, and encountering likely sources that often give rise to conflict in team environments. Being the "Rainbow Nation", South Africa can be particularly susceptible to disagreements borne from social differences. Because we are working with first-year students, and because they are typically busy learning to transition from high school to university, the team exercise had to be designed and implemented in such a way as to ensure that opportunities arose, enabling students to question themselves. In addition to having to develop a software solution of their choice, students were introduced to the concept of Belbin roles to better understand how different personalities positively contribute to software development teams and encouraged to assess their own personalities in this regard. Finally, we asked them to write a reflective essay in which they describe their experiences of working in a team. In some essays, reasons for challenges arising were quite detailed while many identified specific soft skills that would need attention to ensure better success on projects in the future. This was in stark contrast to an initial consensus that the students would be able to work in teams without issue.
Developers collaborating with collective efforts in large-scale distributed software typically have different personalities that might play a central role in software development and in team climate. In this paper, we have investigated if personality traits are related to the perceived team climate of software developers (Computer Science master students) in a smart-working development context. In particular, we conducted a preliminary study with 53 master students of a Computer Science course conducting a project work during the Covid-19 pandemic. Participants were grouped into 19 distributed teams. We analyzed the correlation between personality traits and team climate factors and created a predictive model for Task Orientation using these correlations. Results suggest that the Extroversion personality trait (characteristic of social and easy-going people) is statistically significant. We also observed a (weak) positive correlation with considered team climate factors.
Requirements uncertainty and conflict are the two pervasive phenomena that are currently receiving more attention in the development of information system (IS) projects. The existing literature based on requirements engineering indicates that, as a result of frequent interactions between users and IS practitioners, requirements uncertainty can negatively affect team performance. However, the nature of conflicts and requirements uncertainty have limited exploratory power with regards to software team effectiveness. The main objective of this work is to obtain additional insight into this phenomena by examining the relationships between requirements uncertainty (which comprises both requirements instability and variability) and conflict (i.e. task and relationship conflict). Furthermore, the impact of task and relationship conflict on team effectiveness has also been investigated separately. In order to address these relationships, a theoretical research model was developed and validated through an empirical study based on an on-line questionnaire survey. We gathered 71 complete responses, mostly from experts within the Indian software industry. The findings of this study indicate that there is a strong positive relationship between requirements instability and variability and relationship conflict, however, task conflict task conflict was not found to have a significant relationship with these dimensions. Additionally, we have observed a strong stronger negative effect of relationship conflict on team effectiveness than that of task conflict during the requirements uncertainty.
In this paper, one novel method to extract flux from two dimensional spectral images which we observed through LAMOST (Large Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope) is proposed. First of all, the spectral images are preprocessed. Then, in the flux extraction algorithm, the GRNN (General Regression Neural Network) and double Gaussian function are employed to simulate the profile of each spectrum in spatial orientation. We perform our experiment, with same radial basis function, by GRNN and RBFNN (Radial Basis Function Neural Network) method. The experimental results show that our method performs higher SNR (Signal Noise Ration) and lower time-consuming that is more applicable in such massive spectral data.
Requirements uncertainty and conflict are the two pervasive phenomena that are currently receiving more attention in the development of information system (IS) projects. The existing literature based on requirements engineering indicates that, as a result of frequent interactions between users and IS practitioners, requirements uncertainty can negatively affect team performance. However, the nature of conflicts and requirements uncertainty have limited exploratory power with regard to software team effectiveness. The main objective of this work is to obtain additional insight into this phenomena by examining the relationships between requirements uncertainty (which comprises both requirements instability and variability) and conflict (i.e. task and relationship conflict). Furthermore, the impact of task and relationship conflict on team effectiveness has also been investigated separately. In order to address these relationships, a theoretical research model was developed and validated through an empirical study based on an online questionnaire survey. We gathered 71 complete responses, mostly from experts within the Indian software industry. The findings of this study indicate that there is a strong positive relationship between requirements instability and variability and relationship conflict; however, task conflict task conflict was not found to have a significant relationship with these dimensions. Additionally, we have observed a strong stronger negative effect of relationship conflict on team effectiveness than that of task conflict during the requirements uncertainty.
In this paper, we study the team expansion problem in collaborative environments where people collaborate with each other in the form of a team, which might need to be expanded frequently by having additional team members during the course of the project. Intuitively, there are three factors as well as the interactions between them that have a profound impact on the performance of the expanded team, including (1) the task the team is performing, (2) the existing team members, and (3) the new candidate team member. However, the vast majority of the existing work either considers these factors separately, or even ignores some of these factors. In this paper, we propose a neural network based approach TECE to simultaneously model the interactions between the team task, the team members as well as the candidate team members. Experimental evaluations on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Context
Grey Literature (GL) recently has grown in Software Engineering (SE) research since the increased use of online communication channels by software engineers. However, there is still a limited understanding of how SE research is taking advantage of GL.
Objective
This research aimed to understand how SE researchers use GL in their secondary studies.
Methods
We conducted a tertiary study of studies published between 2011 and 2018 in high-quality software engineering conferences and journals. We then applied qualitative and quantitative analysis to investigate 446 potential studies.
Results
From the 446 selected studies, 126 studies cited GL but only 95 of those used GL to answer a specific research question representing almost 21% of all the 446 secondary studies. Interestingly, we identified that few studies employed specific search mechanisms and used additional criteria for assessing GL. Moreover, by the time we conducted this research, 49% of the GL URLs are not working anymore. Based on our findings, we discuss some challenges in using GL and potential mitigation plans.
Conclusion
In this paper, we summarized the last 10 years of software engineering research that uses GL, showing that GL has been essential for bringing practical new perspectives that are scarce in traditional literature. By drawing the current landscape of use, we also raise some awareness of related challenges (and strategies to deal with them).
In this paper we propose a representation of the competencies of the main roles of the software development teams in the Semat Essence kernel. Some proposals include the profiles of the software teams, but a definition of competencies and levels of competency according to the role of the people in the software development life cycle is still needed. To achieve this, we integrate the theory of organizational competencies with the Semat Essence kernel, for identifying roles and competencies of people with skills of teamwork in software development. As a result, seven competencies with their level of competencies represented in the Semat Essence kernel, additional to the existing representations of the roles involved in the software development life cycle, are obtained. It is expected that software development companies will consider the proposed competencies and the levels of competencies in order to construct efficient software development teams with exceptional performance.
Context: Grey Literature (GL) recently has grown in Software Engineering (SE) research since the increased use of online communication channels by software engineers. However, there is still a limited understanding of how SE research is taking advantage of GL. Objective: This research aimed to understand how SE researchers use GL in their secondary studies. Method: We conducted a tertiary study of studies published between 2011 and 2018 in high-quality software engineering conferences and journals. We then applied qualitative and quantitative analysis to investigate 446 potential studies. Results: From the 446 selected studies, 126 studies cited GL but only 95 of those used GL to answer a specific research question representing almost 21% of all the 446 secondary studies. Interestingly, we identified that few studies employed specific search mechanisms and used additional criteria for assessing GL. Moreover, by the time we conducted this research, 49% of the GL URLs are not working anymore. Based on our findings, we discuss some challenges in using GL and potential mitigation plans. Conclusion: In this paper, we summarized the last 10 years of software engineering research that uses GL, showing that GL has been essential for bringing practical new perspectives that are scarce in traditional literature. By drawing the current landscape of use, we also raise some awareness of related challenges (and strategies to deal with them).
A systematic literature review (SLR) is an empirical method used to provide an overview of existing knowledge and to aggregate evidence within a domain. For computer science, several threats to the completeness of such reviews have been identified, leading to recommendations and guidelines on how to improve their quality. However, few studies address to what extent researchers can replicate an SLR. To conduct a replication, researchers have to first understand how the set of primary studies has been identified in the original study, and can ideally retrieve the same set when following the reported protocol. In this article, we focus on this initial step of a replication and report a two-fold empirical study: Initially, we performed a tertiary study using a sample of SLRs in computer science and identified what information that is needed to replicate the searches is reported. Based on the results, we conducted a descriptive, multi-case study on digital libraries to investigate to what extent these allow replications. The results reveal two threats to replications of SLRs: First, while researchers have improved the quality of their reports, relevant details are still missing—we refer to a reporting threat. Second, we found that some digital libraries are inconsistent in their query results—we refer to a searching threat. While researchers conducting a review can only overcome the first threat and the second may not be an issue for all kinds of replications, researchers should be aware of both threats when conducting, reviewing, and building on SLRs.
Project success is an essential element for the project stakeholders, as there is an increasing trend about the factors that impact project success. Although, there are many factors effecting project success, project managers' contribution is a core element for project success. The objective of this study is to check the effect of personality traits on project success with a mediating effect of emotional intelligence. A total of 123 textile managers in the Faisalabad region are the participants (sample size) of this study. Adopted scales are used and questionnaires are distributed to get the respondents results. Convenience based sampling technique is used for collection of data. Cronbach's alpha is applied to check the internal consistency of items. Process Macro technique is applied to check the mediating effect of emotional intelligence between personality traits and project success. Moreover, direct and indirect effects between variables are also observed. The finding predicts that project managers with the high level of emotional intelligence significantly play role towards project success. More importantly, there is full mediation exist as personality traits has insignificant effect on project success. The outcomes will provide assistance to top management for appointing a project manager for achieving project success by considering the emotional intelligence and ignoring the traits of personality.
Purpose
Software process tailoring (SPT) is a knowledge- and learning-intensive activity in which a software project team customizes its software development processes to accommodate project particularities. Because SPT critically influences how a project is conducted, SPT performance should be investigated, but the extant literature lacks investigations into how team knowledge mechanisms and team environments contribute to SPT performance. To fill this gap, this study looks into a team's absorptive capacity (AC) and combines a transactive memory system (TMS) and team climate inventory (TCI) to develop a theoretical research model to facilitate the understanding of SPT performance.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper is a conceptual study that uses the propositional methodology with a focused review of existing literature pertaining to SPT, AC, TMS and TCI to develop a theoretical model to foster SPT performance. Because this study is conceptually established, further empirical research and studies are also suggested.
Findings
The proposed model provides guidance for firms conducting SPT. It also contributes to future research aiming to empirically understand the mechanisms behind the identified team-based knowledge and environmental enablers in the dynamic team learning process that lead to superior SPT performance.
Originality/value
The proposed model provides a fresh look at the dynamic capabilities theory in SPT and innovatively identifies a team's dynamic learning process to show how a team can conduct effective SPT through AC and facilitated by TMS. Environmental climates characterized by vision, participative safety, task orientation and support for innovation act as positive moderators in promoting the team dynamic learning process.
Context
While the digital economy requires a new generation of technology for scientists and practitioners, the software engineering (SE) field faces a gender crisis. SE research is a global enterprise that requires the participation of both genders for the advancement of science and evidence-based practice. However, women across the world tend to be significantly underrepresented in such research, receiving less funding and less participation, frequently, than men as authors in research publications. Data about this phenomenon is still sparse and incomplete; particularly in evidence-based software engineering (EBSE), there are no studies that analyze the participation of women in this research area.
Objective
The objective of this work is to present the results of a systematic mapping study (SM) conducted to collect and evaluate evidence on female researchers who have contributed to the area of EBSE.
Method
Our SM was performed by manually searching studies in the major conferences and journals of EBSE. We identified 981 studies and 183 were authored/co-authored by women and, therefore, included.
Results
Contributions from women in secondary studies have globally increased over the years, but it is still concentrated in European countries. Additionally, collaboration among research groups is still fragile, based on a few women as a bridge. Latin American researchers contribute a great deal to the field, despite they do not collaborate as much within their region.
Conclusions
The findings from this study are expected to be aggregated to the existing knowledge with respect to women’s contribution to the EBSE area. We expect that our results bring up a reflection on the gender issue and motivate actions and policies to attract female researchers to this area.
The contribution of buildings to energy consumption (both residential and commercial) is expected to gradually increase by 2040 in developed countries globally. Energy demand is rising around the world because of population growth and increased access to power through rapid urbanisation. These increases significantly impact the environment due to the processing of electricity from fossil fuels in heavy-duty power generation plants to cater for demand. A large amount of research has been undertaken in the recent past to mitigate energy usage via the internet of things and energy consumption prediction (IoT-ECP). However, systematic reviews of IoT-ECP applications remain scarce. Therefore, this study aims to systematically review the existing literature to identify the latest trends and their technological advances, including the integration concept and solutions to problems encountered in IoT-ECP. It also highlights the advantages between cloud and edge computing in IoT-ECP integration for real-time data streaming. Additionally, IoT-ECP smart integration promotes close interaction and monitoring of energy usage. Battery storage is a major challenge to tackle energy losses along network bandwidth and live streaming data traffic. Finally, the studies indicates that many existing research in IoT-ECP are using short-term load predictions. These are domains where future research could further expand to cover medium- to long-term time frames, forecasting to better balance demand fluctuations, and provide operational reserves with renewable energies.
Software engineering is related to a set of disciplines both inside and outside computing. One of the aspects to consider in the development of a discipline is cross fertilization. In this paper, author reviews the cross fertilization produced by related disciplines in Software Engineering. The influences come from Computer Engineering and Computer Science inside computing outside this field quality and project management, naming just a few of them. More in particular by focusing on specific technologies, author will overview bidirectional relationships between two of the most promising technologies nowadays namely: blockchain and machine learning.
Context
Previous research found that the performance of a team not only depends on the team personality composition, but also on the interactive effects of team climate. Although investigation on personalities associated with software development has been an active research area over the past decades, there has been very limited research in relation to team climate.
Objective
Our study investigates the association between the five factor model personality traits (openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism) and the factors related to team climate (team vision, participative safety, support for innovation and task orientation) within the context of agile teams working in a telecom company.
Method
A survey was used to gather data on personality characteristics and team climate perceptions of 43 members from eight agile teams. The data was initially used for correlation analysis; then, regression models were developed for predicting the personality traits related to team climate perception.
Results
We observed a statistically significant positive correlation between openness to experience and support for innovation (r = 0.31). Additionally, agreeableness was observed to be positively correlated with overall team climate (r = 0.35). Further, from regression models, we observed that personality traits accounted to less than 15% of the variance in team climate.
Conclusion
A person's ability to easily get along with team members (agreeableness) has a significant positive influence on the perceived level of team climate. Results from our regression analysis suggest that further data may be needed, and/or there are other human factors, in addition to personality traits, that should also be investigated with regard to their relationship with team climate. Overall, the relationships identified in our study are likely to be applicable to organizations within the telecommunications domain that use scrum methodology for software development.
The objective of this report is to propose comprehensive guidelines for systematic literature reviews appropriate for software engineering researchers, including PhD students. A systematic literature review is a means of evaluating and interpreting all available research relevant to a particular research question, topic area, or phenomenon of interest.
Systematic reviews aim to present a fair evaluation of a research topic by using a trustworthy, rigorous, and auditable methodology. The guidelines presented in this report were derived from three existing guidelines used by medical researchers, two books produced by researchers with social science backgrounds and discussions with researchers from other disciplines who are involved
in evidence-based practice. The guidelines have been adapted to reflect the specific problems of software engineering research.
The guidelines cover three phases of a systematic literature review: planning the review, conducting the review and reporting the review. They provide a relatively high level description. They do not consider the impact of the research questions on the review procedures, nor do they specify in detail the mechanisms needed to perform meta-analysis.
In any software development project, in any one of the major stages of the software development life cycles, namely analysis, design, implementation, testing and evaluation each role player plays a significant role in the project's delivery. The human dimension can often be even more important than the technical dimension in any software project, as proven by research [1]. People are known to be one of the success factors in creating and altering software systems. This paper will illustrate and present the existence, if at all, of the correlation between the personality type and individual performance on an information technology project. The Myers-Briggs personality type (derived from the 'Big 5' personality methodology, leading to a less stereotypical type of personality) will be analysed from a personality perspective. The Belbin Team Roles Assessment Tool will also be investigated during the process of reaching my conclusion. This will be useful to project managers to determine which personality types to deploy to which roles in order to maximise individual performance and subsequent project success.
An extensive body of literature indicates the importance of teamwork to the success of innovative projects. This growing awareness, that "good teamwork" increases the success of innovative projects, raises new questions: What is teamwork, and how can it be measured? Why and how is teamwork related to the success of innovative projects? How strong is the relationship between teamwork and various measures of project success such as performance or team member satisfaction? This article develops a comprehensive concept of the collaboration in teams, called Teamwork Quality (TWQ). The six facets of the TWQ construct, i.e., communication, coordination, balance of member contributions, mutual support, effort, and cohesion, are specified. Hypotheses regarding the relationship between TWQ and project success are tested using data from 575 team members, team leaders, and managers of 145 German software teams. The results of the structural equation models estimated show that TWQ (as rated by team members) is significantly associated with team performance as rated by team members, team leaders, and team-external managers. However, the magnitude of the relationship between TWQ and team performance varies by the perspective of the performance rater, i.e., manager vs. team leader vs. team members. Furthermore, TWQ shows a strong association with team members' personal success (i.e., work satisfaction and learning).
Context: Companies increasingly strive to adapt to market and ecosystem changes in real time. Evaluating team performance in such changing environments presents a major challenge. Objective: This paper aims to understand how software developers experience performance in a highly volatile environment. This understanding could be used as a basis for guiding formation and maintenance of high-performing teams and to inform performance improvement initiatives. Method: A qualitative multiple-case study using thematic interviews was conducted with 16 experienced practitioners in five organisations. Results: We found 33 major categories of performance factors, arranged as a theoretical structure that explains how the subjects experience software team performance. Conclusions: Based on our study, software teams are engaged in a constant cycle of interpreting their performance and aligning it with other stakeholders. While differences across organisational sizes exist, a common set of performance experiences is present. Enhancing performance experiences requires integration of soft factors, such as communication, team spirit, and team identity, into the overall development process.
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to investigate how dimensions related to teamwork and team climate can influence decision making and learning of teams (performance). In order to understand which factors are more effective, several relevant group and team characteristics drawn from classical literature on groups and more recent empirical team simulation research have been considered.
Design/methodology/approach
– The paper presents the results of a longitudinal study carried out during four months. A total of 183 Italian participants, divided into 50 teams of three (n=24), four (n=19) and five (n=7) members, have been involved in a business game developed by several European savings banks and simulating a real stock market environment. The aim of each team is not only to earn virtual money, but also learning long-term strategies to develop profitable investments without losing sight of economic factors.
Findings
– Based on literature review, the authors tested three group levels (intragroup relations level, self-member level and group-design level) by making three hypotheses concerning the teams involved in the simulation and investigated the communication and innovation (CI) dimension from the Italian version of the team climate inventory (TCI) by Ragazzoni et al. A correlation between team performance and CI was found (r=0.301 p=0.048), which is in line with the hypothesis that such factors as communication and support for innovation can affect the decision-making performance.
Originality/value
– The results presented in the paper let practitioners understand which dynamics characterize teamwork activities and how such aspects as communication and support for innovation can lead to group learning and decision-making performance. The simulation used in this research is an empirical way to study team performance and group learning without other noise variables.
Context: Companies increasingly strive to adapt to market and ecosystem changes in real time. Evaluating team performance in such changing environments presents a major challenge. Objective: This paper aims to understand how software developers experience performance in a highly volatile environment. This understanding could be used as a basis for guiding formation and maintenance of high-performing teams. Method: A qualitative multiple-case study using thematic interviews was conducted with 16 experienced practitioners in five organisations. Results: We found 33 major cate-gories of performance factors, arranged as a theoretical structure that explains how the subjects experience software team performance. Conclusions: Based on our study, software teams are engaged in a constant cycle of interpreting their performance and aligning it with other stakeholders. Enhancing performance experiences requires integration of soft factors, such as communication, team spirit, and team identity, into the overall development process.
This study explores the personality traits of software development practitioners by using a classification schema based on the personality traits extended on the Myers-Briggs type indicator (MBTI). To extract the information necessary for understanding and classification of software development personnel, we developed a card game playable with either single or multiple participants. The game consists of seventy cards, which have a keyword and a picture on one side and a hypothetical situation typically encountered in software development landscapes with two different selectable options on the other side. The game master (GM) reads a situation by showing the pictures to participants and elicits the most suitable answer in between two selections. Ultimately, the outcome of the game reveals the personality traits of individuals on a compatible scale with the MBTI. To evaluate our game-based personality identification method, we conduct a case study with sixteen individuals at a university environment in seven group sessions. In light of the experience gained, secondly we refine the questions and test the game on sixty software development personnel selected from a set of team-based pairings at a middle size software company. Our preliminary results indicate that there are more individuals in software teams, who may perceive to be extroverted not only in a classroom environment but also in an industrial setting. Moreover, the initial results suggest that our method can be a viable to the classical paper based MBTI tests particularly for managing the workforce in software development projects.
This article reports a replication of a quasi-experimental study analyzing how personality factors and team climate influence software development team effectiveness, product quality and team member satisfaction. The replication was designed on the basis of the original quasi-experimental study, both of which were run in an academic setting. In the original study, data were collected from a sample of 35 three-member developer teams. All these teams used an adaptation of extreme programming (XP) to the academic environment to develop the same software system. In the replication, the data were collected from a sample of 34 three- or four-member developer teams working on the same software project. Student teams used a common object-oriented software development paradigm to solve the set problem and applied the Unified Process. In both studies all teams were formed at random, and their members were blind to the quasi-experimental conditions and hypotheses. The replication of this empirical study aims to verify the results of the original quasi-experiment. It examines, first, whether personality factors (neuroticism, extroversion, agreeableness, openness to experience and conscientiousness) are related to the quality of the developed software and team member satisfaction and, second, whether the preferences, perceptions and preferences-perceptions fit for the four team climate factors (participative safety, support for innovation, team vision and task orientation) are related to the quality of the developed software and team member satisfaction. The results of the replication corroborate some of the findings of the original study. On the one hand, the results revealed that there is a significant correlation between the extroversion personality factor and software quality, but no significant correlation between the extroversion personality factor and team satisfaction. Also, we found that the perception of team climate where participative safety is high is related to better quality software. We observed significant relationships between the perception of the four team climate factors and team member satisfaction. Additionally, the results showed a positive relationship between software quality and teams in which the real climate perception at the end of the project is better than preferences stated by team members at the outset of the project for the participative safety factor. Finally, we found that teams where the real climate is better than the stated preferences for the team orientation factor exhibit a direct and positive relationship to team member satisfaction.
This paper explores the paradoxical role of the external leaders of self-managing work teams. Observation, interviews, group elicitations, and a literature search were used to identify salient leader behaviors in a medium-sized manufacturing plant that had been operating for several years under a system of self-managing work teams. A self-management leadership questionnaire was developed to measure the 21 leader behaviors identified. Correlations with overall leadership-effectiveness ratings generally indicated that the external leaders' most important behaviors are those that facilitate the team's self-management through self-observation, self-evaluation, and self-reinforcement. The study suggests that there is a legitimate role for external leaders of self-managing work teams but that it differs from traditional and participative leadership roles.
From Techie to Boss teaches technical people who are making or mulling the transition from team player to team leader all the management techniques and soft leadership skills they never needed before—but need now, pronto. Veteran team lead and project manager Scott Cromar lays out the classical management training course, but stripped down to precisely the essentials that techies need to start managing on the fly. He gets it that a front-line techie getting a field promotion to team leader just doesn’t have the time to wade through an MBA textbook bulging with irrelevant material.
The author appreciates how you got to the place where you need this book. Management tapped you instead of some experienced manager from the outside because you know the technical challenges, company culture, and team players better than anyone else: you’re ready to hit the ground running. But the skills that make you an excellent techie are not sufficient to make you a successful manager. The rules of your world have abruptly changed. You will now be judged not by your puzzle-solving elegance but by how effectively your team contributes to the organization’s bottom line.
From Techie to Boss shows you how to translate and adapt the analytic skills that made you an outstanding techie to your new responsibilities as a technical manager. Even more crucially, this book teaches you a whole new set of interpersonal, organizational, and metrical skills you never needed before, but without which you cannot succeed as a manager.
This paper reports the development and psychometric validation of a multi-dimensional measure of facet-specific climate for innovation within groups at work: the Team Climate Inventory (TCI). Brief reviews of the organizational climate and work group innovation literatures are presented initially, and the need for measures of facet-specific climate at the level of the proximal work group asserted. The four-factor theory of facet-specific climate for innovation, which was derived from these reviews, is described, and the procedures used to operationalize this model into the original version measure described. Data attesting to underlying factor structure, internal homogeneity, predictive validity and factor replicability across groups of the summarized measure are presented. An initial sample of 155 individuals from 27 hospital management teams provided data for the exploratory factor analysis of this measure. Responses from 121 further groups in four occupations (35 primary health care teams, 42 social services teams, 20 psychiatric teams and 24 oil company teams; total N=971) were used to apply confirmatory factor analysis techniques. This five-factor, 38-item summarized version demonstrates robust psychometric properties, with acceptable levels of reliability and validity. Potential applications of this measure are described and the implication of these findings for the measurement of proximal work group climate are discussed. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Evolutionary psychology adds many insights to the literature on group dynamics and small-group processes. First, groups are a fundamental aspect of human evolution, suggesting that humans have evolved a range of adaptations to deal with specific threats and opportunities afforded by living in groups. Second, an evolutionary perspective integrates knowledge from numerous behavioral science disciplines such as psychology, evolutionary biology, primatology, biological anthropology, social neuroscience, and behavioral economics that are all concerned with group dynamics. Third, an evolutionary analysis produces many novel hypotheses about different aspects of our group psychology. We show the generativity of an evolutionary psychological approach through discussing examples of research applying evolutionary thinking to understanding key adaptive group tasks such as coordination, social exchange, status, group cohesion, collective decision making, and intergroup relations.
In most ways, managing a software team is just like managing any other type of technical team. Technical teams are all made of talented experts. The manager’s job is to enable these experts to improve the organization’s business capability.
This personal historical article traces the development of the Big-Five factor structure, whose growing acceptance by personality researchers has profoundly influenced the scientific study of individual differences. The roots of this taxonomy lie in the lexical hypothesis and the insights of Sir Francis Galton, the prescience of L. L. Thurstone, the legacy of Raymond B. Cattell, and the seminal analyses of Tupes and Christal. Paradoxically, the present popularity of this model owes much to its many critics, each of whom tried to replace it, but failed. In reaction, there have been a number of attempts to assimilate other models into the five-factor structure. Lately, some practical implications of the emerging consensus can be seen in such contexts as personnel selection and classification.
Personnel selection and placement systems are concerned with identifying valid predictors of team performance. This study attempted to identify variables that would predict team performance. Specifically, 78 college students worked in 10 long-standing teams competing in a business simulation. Extraversion, conscientiousness, emotional stability, agreeableness, and predisposition to be a team player were analyzed for their effects on task performance and social cohesion. Analyses revealed no significant effects for extraversion and conscientiousness, while emotional stability predicted task performance and agreeableness predicted cohesion. Predisposition to be a team player predicted both task performance and cohesion. The implications of these results for researchers and practitioners are discussed.
This study seeks to determine the impact of IT co-workers on individual deviance behavior in organizations. Using data collected from 322 IT employees and their supervisors in Chinese software companies, we also examine the impact of the Confucian work ethic on deviant behavior. The results suggest that both co-workers' production deviance and the Confucian work ethic have impacts on individuals' production deviance. The influence of IT co-workers' production deviance was greater in high team climates and low team climates than in neutral team climates. The Confucian work ethic has no significant influence on production deviance in low team climates.
This paper reports the development and psychometric validation of a multi-dimensional measure of facet-specific climate for innovation within groups at work: the Team Climate Inventory (TCI). Brief reviews of the organizational climate and work group innovation literatures are presented initially, and the need for measures of facet-specific climate at the level of the proximal work group asserted. The four-factor theory of facet-specific climate for innovation, which was derived from these reviews, is described, and the procedures used to operationalize this model into the original version measure described. Data attesting to underlying factor structure, internal homogeneity, predictive validity and factor replicability across groups of the summarized measure are presented. An initial sample of 155 individuals from 27 hospital management teams provided data for the exploratory factor analysis of this measure. Responses from 121 further groups in four occupations (35 primary health care teams, 42 social services teams, 20 psychiatric teams and 24 oil company teams; total N = 971) were used to apply confirmatory factor analysis techniques. This five-factor, 38-item summarized version demonstrates robust psychometric properties, with acceptable levels of reliability and validity. Potential applications of this measure are described and the implication of these findings for the measurement of proximal work group climate are discussed.
Such diverse thinkers as Lao-Tze, Confucius, and U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have all pointed out that we need to be able to tell the difference between real and assumed knowledge. The systematic review is a scientific tool that can help with this difficult task. It can help, for example, with appraising, summarising, and communicating the results and implications of otherwise unmanageable quantities of data. This book, written by two highly-respected social scientists, provides an overview of systematic literature review methods: Outlining the rationale and methods of systematic reviews; Giving worked examples from social science and other fields; Applying the practice to all social science disciplines; It requires no previous knowledge, but takes the reader through the process stage by stage; Drawing on examples from such diverse fields as psychology, criminology, education, transport, social welfare, public health, and housing and urban policy, among others. Including detailed sections on assessing the quality of both quantitative, and qualitative research; searching for evidence in the social sciences; meta-analytic and other methods of evidence synthesis; publication bias; heterogeneity; and approaches to dissemination.
Software development is a social activity and the formation of the right team is a critical success factor. Although personality types in software teams and software projects’ success criterias have been studied before, there is no well formed methodology for establishing software teams according to the personality types. This study is performed to search the relation between software team members’ personality types and project success. To achive this goal, a questionnaire based approach is developed to measure project success and personality types. Two software development projects are assessed with a questionnaire that assesses project success in different aspects. Also, all project team members are assessed with respect to their personality types. Results provide insight that, personality type consideration while forming software teams can play a significant role in project success.
In this article, we present a systematic mapping study of research on personality in software engineering. The goal is to plot the landscape of current published empirical and theoretical studies that deal with the role of personality in software engineering. We applied the systematic review method to search and select published articles, and to extract and synthesize data from the selected articles that reported studies about personality. Our search retrieved more than 19,000 articles, from which we selected 90 articles published between 1970 and 2010. Nearly 72% of the studies were published after 2002 and 83% of the studies reported empirical research findings. Data extracted from the 90 studies showed that education and pair programming were the most recurring research topics, and that MBTI was the most used test. Research related to pair programming, education, team effectiveness, software process allocation, software engineer personality characteristics, and individual performance concentrated over 88% of the studies, while team process, behavior and preferences, and leadership performance were the topics with the smallest number of studies. We conclude that the number of articles has grown in the last few years, but contradictory evidence was found that might have been caused by differences in context, research method, and versions of the tests used in the studies. While this raises a warning for practitioners that wish to use personality tests in practice, it shows several opportunities for the research community to improve and extend findings in this field.
Most existing measures of cohesion attempt to objectively measure cohesion while neglecting individual group members' perceptions of their cohesion to a particular group. We propose that group members' perceptions of cohesion are important for the behavior of the individual as well as the group as a whole. We offer a theoretical definition of perceived cohesion which says individuals' perceptions of their own cohesion to a group has two dimensions: sense of belonging and feelings of morale. We test this conceptualization and the adequacy of our Perceived Cohesion Scale in two random samples: students at a small college noted for its strong "school spirit" and residents of a midsized city. Our confirmatory factor analyses indicate a two-factor model, with a high degree of invariance across the two samples, and with the two dimensions correlated over .90 in both. However, as anticipated, perceived cohesion is significantly higher in the college than the city sample.
This study examines the relationship between software project team characteristics and team performance by focusing on two questions: whether or not different team characteristics in software project team affect project performance, and whether or not different types of team motivation lead to different level of influence to the relationship between team characteristics and performance? In this study, we argue that team motivation should be considered as a moderate between the relationship of team characteristics and performance. Different kind and level of team motivation can result in different project performance outcome. We examine the interaction effects between team characteristics and team motivation before their final impact to the performance. The results show that the relationship between project team characteristics and performance can be interfered with team motivation. Management should pay more attention to team motivation within project teams so that a better project performance could be achieved.
Team climate management of software development teams makes major impact on success of the software project. Whether the software project can deliver the product to the customer in time is much dependent on its reasonable schedule plan and effective team climate management. It is required to integrate software project schedule plan and team climate management plan, and to offer tools for identifying, assessing, and managing the team climate of software development teams, and to obtain a reasonable project schedule plan based on team climate factors analysis. This paper proposes a software project management simulation model based on team climate factors analysis.
Background The influence of individual personalities on individual tasks and team work has been a concern in software engineering over the past 50 years. However, how to use personality analysis and what it can offer for the practice of software engineering is still subject to debate among researchers. Aim The goal of this work is to identify the methods used, topics addressed, personality tests applied, and the main findings produced in the research about personality in software engineering. Method We performed a systematic literature review of peer reviewed studies published between 1970 and 2010. Results Data extracted from 42 studies shows that pair programming and team building are the most recurring research topics and MBTI is the most used test. Conclusions Contradicting evidences were found that may have been caused by differences in context, research method, and versions of the tests used in the studies. While this raises a warning for practitioners that wish to use of personality tests in practice, it shows several opportunities for researchers.
The measurement of factors involved in human performance has become an essential step to move forward in the software industry. Psychometric measurement provides the needed understanding of human potential. The aim of this study was to establish the personality profile of Cuban software engineers according to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). Analysis of the study shows that the most prominent personality type is a combination of extroversion, sensing, thinking and judging.
Context
Many researchers adopting systematic reviews (SRs) have also published papers discussing problems with the SR methodology and suggestions for improving it. Since guidelines for SRs in software engineering (SE) were last updated in 2007, we believe it is time to investigate whether the guidelines need to be amended in the light of recent research.
Objective
To identify, evaluate and synthesize research published by software engineering researchers concerning their experiences of performing SRs and their proposals for improving the SR process.
Method
We undertook a systematic review of papers reporting experiences of undertaking SRs and/or discussing techniques that could be used to improve the SR process. Studies were classified with respect to the stage in the SR process they addressed, whether they related to education or problems faced by novices and whether they proposed the use of textual analysis tools.
Results
We identified 68 papers reporting 63 unique studies published in SE conferences and journals between 2005 and mid-2012. The most common criticisms of SRs were that they take a long time, that SE digital libraries are not appropriate for broad literature searches and that assessing the quality of empirical studies of different types is difficult.
Conclusion
We recommend removing advice to use structured questions to construct search strings and including advice to use a quasi-gold standard based on a limited manual search to assist the construction of search stings and evaluation of the search process. Textual analysis tools are likely to be useful for inclusion/exclusion decisions and search string construction but require more stringent evaluation. SE researchers would benefit from tools to manage the SR process but existing tools need independent validation. Quality assessment of studies using a variety of empirical methods remains a major problem.
ContextThe internal composition of a work team is an important antecedent of team performance and the criteria used to select team members play an important role in determining team composition. However, there are only a handful of empirical studies about the use of team building criteria in the software industry.Objective
The goal of this article is to identify criteria used in industrial practice to select members of a software project team, and to look for relationships between the use of these criteria and project success. In addition, we expect to contribute with findings about the use of replication in empirical studies involving human factors in software engineering.Method
Our research was based on an iterative mix-method, replication strategy. In the first iteration, we used qualitative research to identify team-building criteria interviewing software project managers from industry. Then, we performed a cross-sectional survey to assess the correlations of the use of these criteria and project success. In the second iteration, we used the results of a systematic mapping study to complement the set of team building criteria. Finally, we performed a replication of the survey research with variations to verify and improve the results.ResultsOur results showed that the consistent use team building criteria correlated significantly with project success, and the criteria related to human factors, such as personality and behavior, presented the strongest correlations. The results of the replication did not reproduce the results of the original survey with respect to the correlations between criteria and success goals. Nevertheless, the variations in the design and the difference in the sample of projects allowed us to conclude that the two results were compatible, increasing our confidence on the existence of the correlations.Conclusion
Our findings indicated that carefully selecting team member for software teams is likely to positively influence the projects in which these teams participate. Besides, it seems that the type of development method used can moderate (increase or decrease) this influence. In addition, our study showed that the choice of sampling technique is not straightforward given the many interacting factors affecting this type of investigation.
This paper provides an overview of research related to participation programs in organizations. Although certain relationships, such as the participation-performance association, have been adequately addressed in the literature, other aspects of the participation process have received very limited research attention. We propose that research move away from a narrow focus on certain aspects of the participation process and move toward a more inclusive agenda. To facilitate this movement, we provide a participation framework that organizes what is and is not known about participation, develop an operational definition of participation, summarize the incentives that motivate participation, review individual and organizational contextual factors that relate to participation, describe participation-outcome relationships, and note essential measurement questions.
Teams represent a prevailing approach to getting work done in today’s hypercompetitive business environment. Although there is a widely held assumption that team-related capabilities determine the success of new product development projects, empirical research on team capabilities is scant. Based on the resource-based view of the firm, organizational learning theory, and situated learning theory, this study investigates the interrelationships among team climate, two information-processing capabilities (i.e., team cognition and team intuition), and software quality. As well, this study explores the moderating effect of project complexity between the information-processing capabilities and the quality of the software. In studying the data from 139 software development projects using the partial least squares structural equation modeling methods, we found that team climate has a direct influence on team cognition. Moreover, the findings showed that team cognition was positively related to the quality of the software product in general; in particular, this relationship was found to be far more significant when project complexity was used as a moderator. This finding indicates that the software development team’s ability to process information logically in order to interpret situations effectively allows the team to launch superior software products when unexpected and undesirable events make a project complicated and challenging to perform. In particular, managers should encourage teams to benefit from new ideas and make collective efforts for reaching goals. Managers should also enable teams to specialize in their tasks and improve their collective information-processing capabilities.
Using teams to accomplish work is one of the methods that a wide range of organizations in China have chosen. Teams are now viewed as an effective means to flatten the organizational hierarchy, strengthen cooperation, encourage integration of diversified knowledge and increase productivity. Meanwhile, one of the first human resources management program affected by moving to teams is performance evaluation, which needs good balancing of team performance and individual performance. In this paper, by taking examples of one engineering consultancy company in which working team is frequently used, problems happened in the process of performance evaluation will be discussed and analyzed, and the proposed plan for both identifying team performance and clarifying individual performance will be suggested.
Using 20 actual work units with 79 respondents, this study explores the relationships among group demography, social integration of the group, and individual turnover. Results suggest that heterogeneity in group tenure is associated with lower levels of group social integration which, in turn, is negatively associated with individual turnover. Models of these effects using individual-level integration measures are not significant. Further, the results suggest that it is the more distant group members who are more likely to leave. Both individual-level and group-level age demography directly affect turnover and are not moderated by social integration. The findings suggest a process by which group demography affects outcomes and support the usefulness of organizational demography for understanding group and individual functioning.
Software development in an organisation is often delimited with a number of risks at both macro and micro level. Numerous researchers have focused on abrogating these risks by advocating various mitigation strategies at organisational and technological levels. However, the understanding of how demographics and organisation climate factors can reduce the software risks is largely anecdotal. It is a well known fact, that organisation climate influences the individual's ability in perceiving the risks affecting the software projects. The present study conducted on 300 software practitioners, aims to identify organisational climate dimensions and risk dimensions in Indian software industry through factor analysis. It also establishes empirical relations between the two dimensions with the help of regression analysis. This research is useful for both academicians and practitioners who are struggling to ensure success of the project by developing novel approaches for mitigating risks in software projects.
In order to capitalize on the various technical and behavioural skills needed for a project, system development activities frequently are performed by teams. By surveying 239 information systems (IS) professionals, reports how IS managers, project leaders, and system analysts evaluate the importance of six criteria for determining the effectiveness of an IS team project. Results show that there is a significant difference among the IS professionals. IS managers give more weight to the amount of work a team produced, adherence to schedule, and adherence to budget than do project leaders and system analysts. Results indicate that all IS professionals report that they regard the quality of work produced by the team as the most critical criterion.