How Does the Extraversion of Software Development Teams Influence Team Satisfaction and Software Quality?: A Controlled Experiment

Team member knowledge and expertise are the aspects typically considered important for software team development formation. However, the authors believe that the formation of teams, as is found in literature, could be based on factors related to the personalities of the members of the development team, and that these factors might affect both the quality of the software product developed and the satisfaction perceived by the development team. In this work they present a controlled experiment, which was carried out during an academic course on Data Bases. The intention of this experiment was to evaluate whether the work team’s level of extraversion influenced, on the one hand, the final quality of the software products obtained and, on the other, the satisfaction perceived while this work was being carried out. The results obtained indicate that when forming work teams, project managers and lecturers should carry out a personality test beforehand in order to balance the amount of extraverted team members with those who are not extraverted. This would permit the team members to feel satisfied with the work carried out by the team without reducing the quality of the software products developed.