Links between the personalities, styles and performance in computer programming

Talk given at the 2015 European Open Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering. It reports on a correlational study Zahra Karimi did while visiting our group in Stuttgart. It relates the personalities of programmers with their programmings styles as well as their performance (mainly the quality of their code).

Transcript

1. personalities, computer programming www.uni-stuttgart.de Links between the Stefan Wagner @prof_wagnerst (joint work with Zahra Karimi, Ahmad Baraani-Dastjerdi, Nasser Ghasem-Aghaee) EOSESE 2015, Lille, France 3. December 2015 in styles performance and
2. You can copy, share and change, film and photograph, blog, live-blog and tweet this presentation given that you attribute it to its author and respect the rights and licences of its parts. Slide is based on suggestions by @SMEasterbrook und @ethanwhite
3. Developers differ in their performance, decision making and working habits.
4. Programmers use different programming styles.
5. There is a significant relation between personalities of programmers and their programming styles.
6. Technische Universität München 1 Idea and Design Z. Karimi, A. Baraani-Dastjerdi, N. Ghasem-Aghaee, S. Wagner. Links between the personalities, styles and performance in computer programming. Journal of Systems and Software 111:228–241, 2016.
7. The Big Five Personality Test 5 Closed-Minded Open to New Experiences Disorganised Conscientious Introverted Extraverted Disagreeable Agreeable Calm/Relaxed Nervous / High-Strung Openness to Experience Conscientiousness Extraversion Agreeableness Emotional Stability
8. Programming Styles
9. Programming Styles
10. Programming Styles
11. Cox and Fisher’s Theory Task Situation Individual internal external Influence Programming Styles like personality like experience Programming Context’s Factors
12. Research Questions RQ 1: Which human factors affect certain programming styles? RQ 2: Which factors, human factors and programming styles affect performance?
13. Study Design
14. Data Collection and Analysis Code Repository Developers Correlational and Regression Analysis Questionnaire Automatic Extraction
15. Technische Universität München 2 Human Factors and Styles
16. Programmers with more programming experience used the bottom-up style.
17. High Openness to Experience programmers used the breadth-first style more often than low Openness to Experience Programmers.
18. High Conscientiousness programmers used the depth-first style more often than Low Conscientiousness programmers.
19. Programmers with a positive attitude towards programming used depth-first, breadth-first and bottom-up styles.
20. Technische Universität München 3 Personality, Styles and Performance
21. Programmers who tended to use depth-first more often were better programmers than ones who did not tend to use depth-first.
22. Summary
23. Limitations • Self-developed questionnaire to operationalise some styles • Self-assessed survey • Mainly students in second year of studies • Volunteer bias • Correlations do not need to be cause/effect
24. There is a significant relation between personalities of programmers and their programming styles. Slides are available at www.stefan-wagner.biz.
25. Pictures Used in this Slide Deck Happy Programmers by Jesper Ronn-Jensen (https://flic.kr/p/oi9kA) Computer Work Hero (https://www.jisc.ac.uk/sites/default/files/computer-work- hero.jpg)