South-East European Research Centre (SEERC)

Most industrial software development is carried out by teams, but these teams are composed of individuals, and the ways in which the individuals interact can have a significant effect on how well a team actually operates. Two aspects of this have been studied within the Software Engineering Observatory, which is a research facility that has been set up in the Department of Computer Science at Sheffield University. The first aspect is how different combinations of personality types for the individual developers can affect the way in which they deal with the issues that arise during a software development project, and the extent to which their handling of these issues may disrupt the smooth working of the team. The second aspect is how such disruptions then affect the quality of the deliverables that are produced; where a key finding is that a failure to discuss issues adequately can actually be more damaging than more obvious forms of disruption.