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Towards individualized software engineering: empirical studies should collect psychometrics

Published: 13 May 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Even though software is developed by humans, research in software engineering primarily focuses on the technologies, methods and processes they use while disregarding the importance of the humans themselves. In this paper we argue that most studies in software engineering should give much more weight to human factors. In particular empirical software engineering studies involving human developers should always consider collecting psychometric data on the humans involved. We focus on personality as one important psychometric factor and present initial results from an empirical study investigating correlations between personality and attitudes to software engineering processes and tools. We discuss what are currently hindering a more wide-spread use of psychometrics and how overcoming these hurdles could lead to a more individualized software engineering.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHASE '08: Proceedings of the 2008 international workshop on Cooperative and human aspects of software engineering
May 2008
120 pages
ISBN:9781605580395
DOI:10.1145/1370114
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 13 May 2008

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Author Tags

  1. empirical research
  2. personality
  3. psychometrics
  4. software engineering

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ICSE '08
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CHASE '08 Paper Acceptance Rate 28 of 34 submissions, 82%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 47 of 70 submissions, 67%

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