Finding Relationships between Socio-Technical Aspects and Personality Traits by Mining Developer E-mails

TL;DR

This study explores how personality traits inferred from developer emails relate to social and technical activities in open-source software projects, aiming to improve team formation strategies.

Contribution

It introduces an automatic method to recognize personality traits from emails and analyzes their relationship with developer activities in FLOSS projects.

Findings

Relationships exist between personality traits and developer activities

Personality traits influence communication and technical interactions

Preliminary evidence supports using personality insights for team setup

Abstract

Personality traits influence most, if not all, of the human activities, from those as natural as the way people walk, talk, dress and write to those most complex as the way they interact with others. Most importantly, personality influences the way people make decisions including, in the case of developers, the criteria they consider when selecting a software project they want to participate. Most of the works that study the influence of social, technical and human factors in software development projects have been focused on the impact of communications in software quality. For instance, on identifying predictors to detect files that may contain bugs before releasing an enhanced version of a software product. Only a few of these works focus on the analysis of personality traits of developers with commit permissions (committers) in Free/Libre and Open-Source Software projects and their relationship with the software artifacts they interact with. This paper presents an approach, based on the automatic recognition of personality traits from e-mails sent by committers in FLOSS projects, to uncover relationships between the social and technical aspects that occur during the software development process. Our experimental results suggest the existence of some relationships among personality traits projected by the committers through their e-mails and the social (communication) and technical activities they undertake. This work is a preliminary study aimed at supporting the setting up of efficient work teams in software development projects based on an appropriate mix of stakeholders taking into account their personality traits.