Agile Favors Extroverted Software Engineers
Photo by René Porter on Unsplash
Agile feels pretty dominant in software engineering these days. Most people who are reading this blog will be working in an Agile environment to solve problems.
This morning instead of listening to a ‘production defect’ (that actually is expected behavior) The Secret Developer decided to fire up Google Scholar and found a paper discussing personality traits and their impact on Agile.
Here’s what we can learn from this morning’s search:
Social issues cause projects to fail
“Personal issues are certainly a big deal in software development, and this comes out in the meta-analysis in our paper.
If you were to ask questions about the failure of large software engineering problems most of those would be about communication and personalities.
This stuff is a big deal. I’ve seen teams where the FE team refer to their superiors as ‘backeeeend’ for example. It’s almost as if there is some sort of competition between them.”
Much of the paper in hand talks about the big 5 personality traits and how they are important to think about in software development:
openness to experience (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious)
conscientiousness (efficient/organized vs. extravagant/careless)
extraversion (outgoing/energetic vs. solitary/reserved)
agreeableness (friendly/compassionate vs. critical/rational)
neuroticism (sensitive/nervous vs. resilient/confident)
The relationship between the Big 5 and performance in Agile environments
A relationship has been identified between extroversion and software product quality.
Due to the nature of agile development tasks, this has been found to be compatible with the openness trait.
When we look in detail at the openness trait, we see that it is associated with the following relevant software development skills:
good communication
innovation skills
a detail-oriented mindset
“I know I’m preaching to the choir here. To be productive in agile teams I’ve seen that organizational skills are prized. I’m no ticket pusher, and I get the impression that not keeping the status of HEB-8323 up to date upsets a few people (you guess who).
Being open and adaptable to change is also crucial. I encounter this at work since we change requirements while tickets are in flight frequently, so I think we take this rather to the extreme.
This works against the ‘traditional’ software developer who likes to get things done. The organization oftentimes works against you and prevents you from getting high-value work done. No ticket, no work allowed.”
Effective team structures
The findings of the paper suggest that effective team structures support teams with higher levels of emotional stability, agreeableness, extroversion, and conscientiousness personality traits.
” So, effective teams support people. Not unexpected. We do need to get more socially aware in software development and get a grip on what is going on in our coworkers’ lives. This is a world away from my current experience. A colleague just came from paternity leave, and nobody knew when they were coming back to work. Up until the day they reappeared.”
Vive la différence
”I’m not advocating for a trip back to waterfall development. Far from it.
It is very curious that we are pulling ideal developers from a different skill set than the norm.
The paper highlights that the extroversion trait was more predominant than previously suggested in other literature.
I can’t believe we are getting a collection of extroverted individuals to do our software dev work.
What next? People who can dance?”
Conclusion
The paper underscores the importance of understanding personality traits, particularly extroversion, in forming effective agile software development teams. The extroversion trait was found to be more prevalent in agile teams than previously thought leaving The Secret Developer wondering what might be next in the world of software development.
” I think we all know what might be next. The AI overlords are coming.
Pack your bags and get prepared…”