Investigating the effects of personality traits on pair programming in a higher education setting through a family of experiments

Evidence from our systematic literature review revealed numerous inconsistencies in findings from the Pair Programming (PP) literature regarding the effects of personality on PP’s effectiveness as a pedagogical tool. In particular: i) the effect of differing personality traits of pairs on the successful implementation of pair-programming (PP) within a higher education setting is still unclear, and ii) the personality instrument most often used had been Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), despite being an indicator criticized by personality psychologists as unreliable in measuring an individual’s personality traits. These issues motivated the research described in this paper. We conducted a series of five formal experiments (one of which was a replicated experiment), between 2009 and 2010, at the University of Auckland, to investigate the effects of personality composition on PP’s effectiveness. Each experiment looked at a particular personality trait of the Five-Factor personality framework. This framework comprises five broad traits (Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism), and our experiments focused on three of these - Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness. A total of 594 undergraduate students participated as subjects. Overall, our findings for all five experiments, including the replication, showed that Conscientiousness and Neuroticism did not present a statistically significant effect upon paired students’ academic performance. However, Openness played a significant role in differentiating paired students’ academic performance. Participants’ survey results also indicated that PP not only caused an increase in satisfaction and confidence levels but also brought enjoyment to the tutorial classes and enhanced students’ motivation

Links between the personalities, styles and performance in computer programming

There are repetitive patterns in strategies of manipulating source code. For example, modifying source code before acquiring knowledge of how a code works is a depth-first style and reading and understanding before modifying source code is a breadth-first style. To the extent we know there is no study on the influence of personality on them. The objective of this study is to understand the influence of personality on programming styles. We did a correlational study with 65 programmers at the University of Stuttgart. Academic achievement, programming experience, attitude towards programming and five personality factors were measured via self-assessed survey. The programming styles were asked in the survey or mined from the software repositories. Performance in programming was composed of bug-proneness of programmers which was mined from software repositories, the grades they got in a software project course and their estimate of their own programming ability. We did statistical analysis and found that Openness to Experience has a positive association with breadth-first style and Conscientiousness has a positive association with depth-first style. We also found that in addition to having more programming experience and better academic achievement, the styles of working depth-first and saving coarse-grained revisions improve performance in programming.Comment: 27 pages, 6 figure

An Exploratory Study of Patient Falls

Debate continues between the contribution of education level and clinical expertise in the nursing practice environment. Research suggests a link between Baccalaureate of Science in Nursing (BSN) nurses and positive patient outcomes such as lower mortality, decreased falls, and fewer medication errors. Purpose: To examine if there a negative correlation between patient falls and the level of nurse education at an urban hospital located in Midwest Illinois during the years 2010-2014? Methods: A retrospective crosssectional cohort analysis was conducted using data from the National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators (NDNQI) from the years 2010-2014. Sample: Inpatients aged ≥ 18 years who experienced a unintentional sudden descent, with or without injury that resulted in the patient striking the floor or object and occurred on inpatient nursing units. Results: The regression model was constructed with annual patient falls as the dependent variable and formal education and a log transformed variable for percentage of certified nurses as the independent variables. The model overall is a good fit, F (2,22) = 9.014, p = .001, adj. R2 = .40. Conclusion: Annual patient falls will decrease by increasing the number of nurses with baccalaureate degrees and/or certifications from a professional nursing board-governing body

Importance of culture, personality and environmental awareness in automotive purchasing behavior

While the automotive industry is in a historical transformation phase, it is essential for affected manufacturers to meet the associated challenges. Today, more than ever, established automotive groups are required to address the prevailing demand mechanisms as precisely as possible to remain competitive in the market. In this context, market research and the analysis of customer behavior are becoming increasingly important. Behavioral analyses offer the opportunity to accurately identify the demands of international mobility customers, to implement these needs in the form of products or brand strategies, and thus to satisfy both customer and company interests. The present cumulative dissertation consists of three research projects. The central and comprehensive objective of the individual essays was to contribute to the behavioral analysis of automotive customers and to investigate the influences of culture, personality and environmental awareness. Moreover, the relevance of behavioral theories in automotive marketing practice was assessed, and differentiators of automotive brand management were examined. Against the background of the research questions raised, partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) offered a very practical methodology. This analysis technique served to illustrate significant moderating characteristics of the investigated constructs such as culture, personality, and environmental awareness in the automotive/marketing-specific context and helped to investigate brand theorems (e.g., brand personality, self-congruity, and green marketing) in connection with established consumer metrics such as perception and behavior

Is social decision making for close others consistent across domains and within individuals?

Humans make decisions across a variety of social contexts. Though social decision-making research has blossomed in recent decades, surprisingly little is known about whether social decision-making preferences are consistent across different domains. We conducted an exploratory study in which participants made choices about 2 types of close others: parents and friends. To elicit decision making preferences, we pit the interests in parents and friends against one another. To assess the consistency of preferences for close others, decision making was assessed in three domains-risk taking, probabilistic learning, and self-other similarity judgments. We reasoned that if social decision-making preferences are consistent across domains, participants ought to exhibit the same preference in all three domains (i.e., a parent preference, based on prior work), and individual differences in preference magnitude ought to be conserved across domains within individuals. A combination of computational modeling, random coefficient regression, and traditional statistical tests revealed a robust parent-over-friend preference in the risk taking and probabilistic learning domains but not the self-other similarity domain. Preferences for parent-over-friend in the risk-taking domain were strongly associated with similar preferences in the probabilistic learning domain but not the self-other similarity domain. These results suggest that distinct and dissociable value-based and social-cognitive computations underlie social decision making. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)

Are team personality and climate related to satisfaction and software quality? Aggregating results from a twice replicated experiment

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Information and Software Technology. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Information and Software Technology, [VOL 57, (2015)] DOI 10.1016/j.infsof.2014.09.002Context Research into software engineering teams focuses on human and social team factors. Social psychology deals with the study of team formation and has found that personality factors and group processes such as team climate are related to team effectiveness. However, there are only a handful of empirical studies dealing with personality and team climate and their relationship to software development team effectiveness. Objective We present aggregate results of a twice replicated quasi-experiment that evaluates the relationships between personality, team climate, product quality and satisfaction in software development teams. Method Our experimental study measures the personalities of team members based on the Big Five personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism) and team climate factors (participative safety, support for innovation, team vision and task orientation) preferences and perceptions. We aggregate the results of the three studies through a meta-analysis of correlations. The study was conducted with students. Results The aggregation of results from the baseline experiment and two replications corroborates the following findings. There is a positive relationship between all four climate factors and satisfaction in software development teams. Teams whose members score highest for the agreeableness personality factor have the highest satisfaction levels. The results unveil a significant positive correlation between the extraversion personality factor and software product quality. High participative safety and task orientation climate perceptions are significantly related to quality. Conclusions First, more efficient software development teams can be formed heeding personality factors like agreeableness and extraversion. Second, the team climate generated in software development teams should be monitored for team member satisfaction. Finally, aspects like people feeling safe giving their opinions or encouraging team members to work hard at their job can have an impact on software quality. Software project managers can take advantage of these factors to promote developer satisfaction and improve the resulting product.This research has been funded by the following projects: Experiment Replication and Synthesis Technologies in SE (MICINN TIN2011-23216) and Go Lite (MICINN TIN2011-24139)

Are team personality and climate related to satisfaction and software quality? Aggregating results from a twice replicated experiment

Research into software engineering teams focuses on human and social team factors. Social psychology deals with the study of team formation and has found that personality factors and group processes such as team climate are related to team effectiveness. However, there are only a handful of empirical studies dealing with personality and team climate and their relationship to software development team effectiveness. Objective We present aggregate results of a twice replicated quasi-experiment that evaluates the relationships between personality, team climate, product quality and satisfaction in software development teams. Method Our experimental study measures the personalities of team members based on the Big Five personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism) and team climate factors (participative safety, support for innovation, team vision and task orientation) preferences and perceptions. We aggregate the results of the three studies through a meta-analysis of correlations. The study was conducted with students. Results The aggregation of results from the baseline experiment and two replications corroborates the following findings. There is a positive relationship between all four climate factors and satisfaction in software development teams. Teams whose members score highest for the agreeableness personality factor have the highest satisfaction levels. The results unveil a significant positive correlation between the extraversion personality factor and software product quality. High participative safety and task orientation climate perceptions are significantly related to quality. Conclusions First, more efficient software development teams can be formed heeding personality factors like agreeableness and extraversion. Second, the team climate generated in software development teams should be monitored for team member satisfaction. Finally, aspects like people feeling safe giving their opinions or encouraging team members to work hard at their job can have an impact on software quality. Software project managers can take advantage of these factors to promote developer satisfaction and improve the resulting product

Evaluation of the influence of personality types on performance of shared tasks in a collaborative environment

Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) is an area of computing that has been receiving much attention in recent years. Developments in groupware technology, such as MERL’s Diamondtouch and Microsoft’s Surface, have presented us with new, challenging and exciting ways to carry out group tasks. However, these groupware technologies present us with a novel area of research in the field of computing – that being multi-user Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). With multi-user HCI, we no longer have to cater for one person working on their own PC. We must now consider multiple users and their preferences as a group in order to design groupware applications that best suit the needs of that group. In this thesis, we aim to identify how groups of two people (dyads), given their various personality types and preferences, work together on groupware technologies. We propose interface variants to both competitive and collaborative systems in an attempt to identify what aspects of an interface or task best suit the needs of the different dyads, maximising their performance and producing high levels of user satisfaction. In order to determine this, we introduce a series of user experiments that we carried out with 18 dyads and analyse their performance, behaviour and responses to each of 5 systems and their respective variants. Our research and user experiments were facilitated by the DiamondTouch – a collaborative, multi-user tabletop device

Influencia de la meticulosidad en la adecuación funcional y mantenibilidad de sistemas orientados a objetos

Una cantidad importante de estudios ha evidenciado que la personalidad influye de manera positiva en el ámbito de la ingeniería de software. Sin embargo, solo unos pocos estudios empíricos han analizado la influencia de la personalidad en los atributos de calidad del software. El objetivo de este trabajo es evaluar los efectos que tiene la formación de grupos homogéneos bajo la dimensión de la meticulosidad, con respecto a la mantenibilidad en sistemas orientados a objetos y la adecuación funcional del producto software. Se contó con un total de 76 participantes, y se empleó una herramienta computacional basada en un mecanismo de algoritmo genético, considerando la personalidad de los estudiantes como criterio de agrupación. Como resultado, se evidenció que no existe una diferencia significativa que permita afirmar que la formación de grupos homogéneos haya obtenido mejores resultados con respecto a las métricas Chidamber & Kemerer (CK) y a la adecuación funcional. A pesar de estos resultados, las puntuaciones promedio de las métricas Coupling Between Objects (CBO) y Response for a Class (RFC) en el grupo experimental estuvieron ligeramente por encima del umbral deseado y ligeramente por debajo del promedio del grupo de control. Esto indica que la meticulosidad en la formación de grupos podría afectar la complejidad del diseño, la modularidad, la propensión a fallas y la facilidad de realizar pruebas en las clases. Se sugiere seguir explorando qué dimensiones específicas de la personalidad pueden influir en los diferentes atributos de calidad del software y en general de la ciencia de la computación