Selection and Allocation of People based on Technical and Personality Profiles for Software Development Projects

Abstract

In software development projects, software engineers play different functional roles, requiring a variety of technical and personality profiles. Disregarding such profiles during the selection and allocation of people to roles implies a serious risk of project failure, since members of the development team can perform unsatisfactorily their activities due to the lack of technical skills or inadequate personality traits. In such a scenario, the process of selecting and allocating people to functional roles is complex, tiring and error prone, especially when performed on an ad-hoc basis and only supported by the experience of the project manager, since there may be numerous candidate solutions that should be identified and evaluated. In such a direction, based on technical and personality profiles, this paper proposes a systematic and automatic approach for selecting and allocating people to functional roles in software development projects, recommending technically qualified and psychologically adequate people for each functional role of the software project, providing the project manager with an effective tool to support the decision-making process. Experimental results based on a real case study reveal the potential practical applicability of the proposed approach.