Exploring the Relationship Between Personality Traits and User Feedback

TL;DR

This study investigates how user personality traits, especially neuroticism, influence the nature and quality of feedback in software development, highlighting the importance of considering personality in feedback analysis.

Contribution

It provides preliminary evidence linking neuroticism to feedback elaborateness and feature ratings, emphasizing the role of personality in user feedback in software engineering.

Findings

Neuroticism correlates with feedback elaborateness.

Neuroticism influences ratings of specific features.

Sensitivity to frustration affects feedback quality.

Abstract

Previous research has studied the impact of developer personality in different software engineering scenarios, such as team dynamics and programming education. However, little is known about how user personality affect software engineering, particularly user-developer collaboration. Along this line, we present a preliminary study about the effect of personality traits on user feedback. 56 university students provided feedback on different software features of an e-learning tool used in the course. They also filled out a questionnaire for the Five Factor Model (FFM) personality test. We observed some isolated effects of neuroticism on user feedback: most notably a significant correlation between neuroticism and feedback elaborateness; and between neuroticism and the rating of certain features. The results suggest that sensitivity to frustration and lower stress tolerance may negatively impact the feedback of users. This and possibly other personality characteristics should be considered when leveraging feedback analytics for software requirements engineering.