Investigating the Effects of Personality on Software Design in a Higher Education Setting Through an Experiment

Software development is a human activity typically performed by individuals or groups working in an organization. For this task to be successful, a variety of human factors must be considered, from individual factors (cognitive capacity or motivation of the developer) to group factors (ease of teamwork or to participate in social interaction) This research focuses on the study of the possible correlation between the personality of the software engineer and their individual specific capacity for software design. The fundamentals of characterization of currently accepted personality features and a comparison of these features in the adult population in Mexico, Canada, United States and Brazil are presented. Finally, the results of an experiment with computer engineering students from a Mexican university are presented, relating these characteristics with their ability to develop software design products.