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The Influence of Personality on Software Quality – A Systematic Literature Review

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Part of the book series: Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing ((AISC,volume 1159))

Abstract

Context: Software quality is an important factor for reducing costs or increasing sales of a software developing company. Humans are involved in the whole software development process. This suggests that human factors have an influence on the result of the development process. Aim: We aimed to understand which distinct human factors or personality traits have an influence on which distinct software quality attributes. Method: For this purpose, we conducted a Systematic Literature Review following the guidelines of Kitchenham and Charters. Results: Existing studies show a link between human factors or personality types and software quality in general. There were only two studies which mentioned an influence on distinct software quality aspects: Extraversion influences decomposition, modularization, testability, functionality, re-usability and programming style. Personality in general influences memory consumption and runtime. Conclusions: We expected to find more such links but research conducted until now is far from being sufficient to provide a strong basis for making clear statements on the link between the personality of a software engineer and distinct software quality attributes.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.crd.york.ac.uk/CRDWeb/AboutPage.asp.

  2. 2.

    http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.

  3. 3.

    http://dl.acm.org.

  4. 4.

    http://www.sciencedirect.com.

  5. 5.

    First two letters of the first author’s surname + year of publishing + first four letters of the title, e.g.: M. Petticrew and H. Roberts. Systematic reviews in the social sciences: A practical guide. John Wiley & Sons, 2008 \(\Rightarrow \) paper id: Pe2008Syst .

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Acknowledgments

The present work as part of the EVELIN project was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung) under grant number 01PL12022E. The authors are responsible for the content of this publication.

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Correspondence to Erica Weilemann .

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Weilemann, E., Brune, P. (2020). The Influence of Personality on Software Quality – A Systematic Literature Review. In: Rocha, Á., Adeli, H., Reis, L., Costanzo, S., Orovic, I., Moreira, F. (eds) Trends and Innovations in Information Systems and Technologies. WorldCIST 2020. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1159. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45688-7_75

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