THE ROLE OF INDIVIDUAL BEHAVIOR
IN SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
Proceedings of INTERACT’95
Elif Demirors and Frank Coyle
ABSTRACT - Human behavior plays a significant role in software development where
customers, designers, programmers, and managers interact to produce software.
Software engineering has begun to recognize the importance of cognitive science
studies that relate human behavior to successful software development. Our goal
is to identify the human behavioral factors affecting productivity and software
quality, and to propose a set of guidelines to improve software tools. Along these
directions we have been investigating studies on human behavioral factors in software
development. Our results indicate that factors can be identified at three levels:
individual behavior, group or team behavior, and organizational behavior. In this
paper, we focus on individual behavior and review several related empirical studies.
The results of these studies point to experience and problem-solving strategy
as the most significant factors affecting performance. We also identify the implications
of these studies for software development environments.