Evaluating the impact of developers’ personality on the intention to adopt model-driven web engineering approaches: an observational study

Abstract

Context: During the last decades, MDWE approaches have claimed important advantages in terms of short and long term productivity and maintainability gains. Despite this, they suffer from a low level of adoption. Being a complex socio-technical activity, individual developer’s characteristics such as personality are likely to be playing an important role on such low adoption rate. Objective: To study the main software developer’s personality factors (extroversion, neuroticism and psychoticism) that may be contributing to the low adoption rate of MDWE approaches. Method: We have proposed a theoretical model that has guided the design of an observational study with 71 subjects from the University of Alicante. After following an MDWE course, the subjects were measured both in terms of their psychological profile and their intention to adopt an MDWE approach in the future. Results: The study shows that neuroticism significantly influences the intention to adopt an MDWE approach: subjects rating high in this dimension regard MDWE as significantly more difficult to use, and they show lower interest in using MDWE in future developments. Conclusions: According to our data, in order to reach a wider audience, MDWE approaches need to improve their ease of use, and limit the amount of potential developer’s stressors.