Evaluating the Effect of Developers’ Personality and Productivity on their Intention to Use Model-Driven Web Engineering Techniques: An Exploratory Observational Study

Abstract

Context: During the last decades, MDWE approaches have claimed important advantages in terms of short and long term productivity gains. However, the extent of such objective gains is still not clear. Moreover, despite such gains, they suffer from a low level of adoption. Being a complex socio-technical activity, not only productivity but also individual developer’s characteristics such as personality are potential explanatory factors of such situation. Objective: To study the relationship between (a) intention to use MDWE approaches and (b) individual personality and productivity factors. Method: We have proposed a conceptual model that has guided the design of an observational study with 77 subjects from the University of Alicante. After following an MDWE course, the subjects were measured in terms of their psychological profile, their productivity and their intention to use an MDWE approach in the future. Results: The study shows that higher levels of neuroticism relate with lower intention to use MDWE: subjects rating high in this dimension regard MDWE as significantly more difficult to use, and they show lower interest in using MDWE in future developments. Also, it shows how highly effective MDWE developers express a higher intention to use the approach. Conclusions: According to our data, in order to reach a wider audience, MDWE approaches need to improve their ease of use, and limit the amount of potential developer’s stressors. Also, our data suggest that the MDWE community should focus on improving the effectiveness of the developers, since it is the increased effectiveness rather than the efficiency what is significantly related with the intention to use MDWE in the future.