Links between the personalities, styles and performance in computer programming

A talk given at the German Software Engineering conference 2017 in Hannover. It summarises our findings of how personality traits influence programming styles and in turn programming performance.
The corresponding paper is published here:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2015.09.011
https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.10169

Transcript

1. SE 2017 Hannover, 2017-02-22 Stefan Wagner Links between the personalities, styles and performance in computer programming
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 licenses of its parts. based on slides 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. Idea and Design
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. Top-down & depth-first Top-down & breadth-first Bottom-up & depth-first Bottom-up & breadth-first Programming Styles
9. Programming Style: Top-Down & Depth-First find hypothesis modify model find hypothesis modify model modify code modify code test code test code mental model code run
10. Programming Style: Bottom-Up & Breadth-First mental model code run find hypothesis find hypothesis modify code test code modify model
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 Age Gender Programming Experience Attitude towards Programming Personality Factors Human Factors Programming Styles ? ? Programming Performance Programmer Quality (self-assessed) Project and Code Quality (Grade) Code Quality (Static Analysis Warnings)
14. Data Collection and Analysis Code Repository Developers Correlational and Regression Analysis Questionnaire Automatic Extraction
15. 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. 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. Significant Correlations (All Positive) Programming Performance Number of Programming Languages (Experience) Age Academic Achievement Depth-First Programming Style Conscientiousness (Personality) Years at University (Experience) Large Revisions (Programming Style)
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.
25. Prof. Dr. Stefan Wagner e-mail stefan.wagner@informatik.uni-stuttgart.de phone +49 (0) 711 685-88455 WWW www.iste.uni-stuttgart.de/se Twitter prof_wagnerst ORCID 0000-0002-5256-8429 arXiv http://arxiv.org/a/wagner_s_1 Institute of Software Technology Slides are available at www.stefan-wagner.biz. Joint work with Zahra Karimi, Ahmad Baraani-Dastjerdi, Nasser Ghasem-Aghaee
26. Pictures Used in this Slide Deck Programmer writing code with Unit Tests by Joonspoon under CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/File:Programmer_writing_code_with_Unit_Tests.jpg) 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) Source code security plugin by Christiaan Colen under CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://www.flickr.com/photos/ 132889348@N07/20013034943)