Toward Increasing Collaboration Awareness in Software Engineering Teams

• Main Authors: Chowdhury, Shuddha, Walter, Charles, Gamble, Rose
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Agile software development; capstone projects; Collaboration; Computer science; personality traits; Software; Software engineering; Teamwork
• ISSN: 2377-634X
• DOI: 10.1109/FIE.2018.8659198

This Research Full Paper investigates collaborative personality traits in undergraduate software engineering teams. Online tools, such as Slack.com, provide team engagement and project management. While metrics can be defined for team and individual performance, it is difficult to measure collaboration and its impacts. Specifically, the forms of collaboration that lead to a successful software product should have associated metrics that correlate with individual performance, peer assessments, and project outcomes. Given the difficulty of assembling teams that best exemplify collaborative personality traits, it may be more beneficial for team members to recognize these traits so that their positive aspects can be exploited toward a successful product outcome. We employ IBM Watson TM Personality Insights service to analyze team Slack.com posts collected from forty students across ten teams and two semesters of the capstone class. We correlate thirteen traits recognized for influencing collaboration with team grades, Sprint meeting check-in quality, and peer evaluations. The correlations show that each trait is related to at least one performance metric during at least one of the Sprints. We discuss the potential meaning of different traits emerging at different times during the semester and how that can inform strategies for software developer collaboration awareness and reward.