Are Individual Differences in Software Development Performance Possible to Capture Using a Quantitative Survey?

  • Authors:

  • Claes Wohlin

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Software Engineering, School of Engineering, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Box 520, SE-372 25 Ronneby, Sweden claes.wohlin@bth.se

  • Venue:
  • Empirical Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2004

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Software engineering is human intensive. Thus, it is important to understand and evaluate the value of different types of experiences, and their relation to the quality of the developed software. Many job advertisements focus on requiring knowledge of, for example, specific programming languages. This may seem sensible at first sight, but is it really possible to capture software development performance using this kind of simple measure? On the other hand, maybe it is sufficient to have general knowledge in programming and then it is enough to learn a specific language within the new job. Two key questions are (1) whether prior knowledge of a specific language actually does improve software quality and (2) whether it is possible to capture performance using simple quantitative measures? This paper presents an empirical study where the experience, for example with respect to a specific programming language, of students is assessed using a quantitative survey at the beginning of a course on the personal software process (PSP), and the outcome of the course is evaluated, for example, using the number of defects and development time. Statistical tests are used to analyze the relationship between experience/background and the performance of the students in terms of software quality. The results are mostly unexpected, for example, we are unable to show any significant relation between experience in the programming language used and the number of defects detected.