Investigating the impact of personality types on communication and collaboration-viability in pair programming - An empirical study

Abstract

This paper presents two controlled experiments (a pilot and the main one) investigating the impact of developer personalities and temperaments on communication, collaboration-pair viability and ultimately effectiveness in pair programming. The objective of the experiments was to compare pairs of mixed/heterogeneous developer personalities and temperaments with pairs of the same personalities and temperaments, in terms of pair effectiveness. Pair effectiveness is expressed in terms of pair performance, measured by communication, velocity, productivity and customer satisfaction, and pair collaboration-viability measured by developers' satisfaction, knowledge acquisition and participation (collaboration satisfaction ratio, nuisance ratio, voluntary or mandatory preference, and driver or navigator preference). The results have shown that there is significant difference between the two groups, indicating better communication and collaboration-viability for the pairs with mixed personalities/temperaments. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.