  Context: Individuals' personality traits have been shown to influence their
behavior during team work. In particular, positive group attitudes are said to
be essential for distributed and global software development efforts where
collaboration is critical to project success. Objective: Given this, we have
sought to study the influence of global software practitioners' personality
profiles from a psycholinguistic perspective. Method: Artifacts from ten teams
were selected from the IBM Rational Jazz repository and mined. We employed
social network analysis (SNA) techniques to identify and group practitioners
into two clusters based on the numbers of messages they communicated, Top
Members and Others, and used standard statistical techniques to assess
practitioners' engagement in task changes associated with work items. We then
performed psycholinguistic analysis on practitioners' messages using linguistic
dimensions of the LIWC tool that had been previously correlated with the Big
Five personality profiles. Results: For our sample of 146 practitioners, we
found that the Top Members demonstrated more openness to experience than the
Other practitioners. Additionally, practitioners involved in usability-related
tasks were found to be highly extroverted, and coders were most neurotic and
conscientious. Conclusion: High levels of organizational and inter-personal
skills may be useful for those operating in distributed settings, and
personality diversity is likely to boost team performance.
