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On Fixing Bugs: Do Personality Traits Matter?

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Product-Focused Software Process Improvement (PROFES 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14483))

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Abstract

We present the results of a prospective observational study aimed to understand whether there is a relationship between personality traits (i.e., agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, neuroticism, and openness) and the performance of undergraduates in Computer Science while accomplishing bug fixing. We involved 62 undergraduates, who took part in eight laboratory sessions. The experimental sessions took place over a period of seven weeks. In each session, the participants were asked to fix bugs either in a C or in a Java program. We collected a relevant number of observations (496, in total) so making our study the largest (quantitative) one on the impact of personality on individual performance while executing an SE task. We observed that the lower the neuroticism level of a student, the better his/her performance in fixing bugs is.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    While it is forbidden to pay students for participating in research studies in our country, it is allowed to reward them with a bonus in their final mark.

  2. 2.

    “None” indicated that the student had not passed (or never sit) the exam of the course while, for example, “28–30” indicates that the student had passed the exam of the course with the highest marks.

  3. 3.

    On a few occasions, some participants informed us that they were unable to take part in an experimental session. When this happened, we arranged an ad-hoc experimental session, before the next one (if any).

  4. 4.

    It is a meditation technique that, through breathing, aims to keep the mind calm and educate attention by focusing only on one thing at a time [42].

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Funding

This study has been partially supported by “MOOD-Mindfulness fOr sOftware Developers” (CUP: D53D23008880006), a research project funded by the Italian Ministry for Universities and Research (MUR).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Salerno, Fisciano, Italy

    Simone Romano, Giuseppe Scanniello & Genoveffa Tortora

  2. University of Bari, Bari, Italy

    Maria Teresa Baldassarre & Danilo Caivano

Authors
  1. Simone Romano
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  2. Giuseppe Scanniello
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  3. Maria Teresa Baldassarre
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  4. Danilo Caivano
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  5. Genoveffa Tortora
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Simone Romano .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. FHV Vorarlberg University of Applied Science, Dornbirn, Austria

    Regine Kadgien

  2. Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering, Kaiserslautern, Germany

    Andreas Jedlitschka

  3. FHV Vorarlberg University of Applied Science, Dornbirn, Austria

    Andrea Janes

  4. University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland

    Valentina Lenarduzzi

  5. University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland

    Xiaozhou Li

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Romano, S., Scanniello, G., Baldassarre, M.T., Caivano, D., Tortora, G. (2024). On Fixing Bugs: Do Personality Traits Matter?. In: Kadgien, R., Jedlitschka, A., Janes, A., Lenarduzzi, V., Li, X. (eds) Product-Focused Software Process Improvement. PROFES 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14483. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49266-2_31

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49266-2_31

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-49265-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-49266-2

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