PPIG 2020 - 31st Annual Workshop
Assessing a candidate's natural disposition for a software development role using MBTI
Daniel Varona, Luiz Fernando Capretz
Abstract: Over the past decade, there has been a marked interest in understanding the personal traits of software developers and their influence on the process of assigning people to roles, as has been evident from the growing number of related publications on this topic. This study is part of a larger research project focussed on identifying the elements associated with the candidate´s personal traits and how these traits better fit with particular software development roles. Our goal in this study is to complement the current approach to assigning roles, which is based on an individual’s capacity to fulfill a role´s functional competencies profile during the assignment process. Our approach helps to support the assigning of people to software development roles by providing a set of tools, based on Myers-Briggs type indicators, to assess a candidate´s natural disposition. To do this, we modeled the results obtained in a previous study on software developer preferences for tasks associated with software industry roles. As a result, we obtained a set of rules to be considered at the time of assignment— relationship values between MBTI type indicators based on preferences— and then mathematically formalized a coefficient to evaluate the natural disposition of candidates during the allocation process.