Personality characteristics in an XP team: a repertory grid study

ABSTRACT

There is a "folk belief" that certain personalities fit with particular systems development roles: however, there is little evidence to confirm this supposition. As part of a larger study an XP development team was investigated using a repertory grid approach (this is discussed in detail) to determine whether coherent personalities and characteristics emerge for different roles. The results, which are inevitably limited, suggest that this is the case. Further work remains to be done to build a large corpus of data for future analysis before firm mappings can be made between appropriate personality characteristics and software development roles.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  K. Computing Milieux
  K.6 MANAGEMENT OF COMPUTING AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS
      K.6.1 Project and People Management

Additional Classification:
  K. Computing Milieux
  K.7 THE COMPUTING PROFESSION
      K.7.1 Occupations

General Terms:
Human Factors

Keywords:
XP, agile teams, personality characteristics, repertory grids, systems development roles