A Winning Team - What Personality Has To Do With Software Engineering

Nowadays, software is developed in teams. But how should teams be put together in order to build a high quality team? This study shows how the different roles in a software development team - project leader, requirements engineer, architect/ designer, and developer/tester/maintainer - should be staffed with respect to HEXACO personality traits in order to form a high quality team. We conducted a qualitative analysis by leading 12 semistructured interviews with interviewees who work in the software engineering sector and have working experience of at least 2 years. We followed a Grounded Theory approach to derive personality traits and link them to software engineering roles. Our study shows that different personality profiles are indeed beneficial for the different roles. A project leader e.g. should have a more pronounced Agreeableness domain whereas the Extraversion domain should be pronounced with a requirements engineer. Our results should support the composition of software engineering teams with the aim to successfully build high quality teams.