Human Aspects in Software Development: A Systematic Mapping Study

Abstract

Software development is a process that requires a high level of human talent management to ensure its success. This makes it a topic of interest to the software industry and research. Considering this interest, it is evident the need to know the aspects that have been studied, how they have been measured, and what data analysis methods have been used. This paper presents an analysis of the human aspects associated with the software development process, identifying procedures and methods used to analyze data and its measurement. A systematic mapping with a sample of 99 studies identified by their relationship with the proposed topic was used as the research method. The main findings show that one of the most studied is personality. This aspect is related to the performance of software development teams and is a key variable for its conformation. Concerning the most used data source, we find the survey based on self-reporting. Finally, descriptive statistics is the most frequent method of analysis, which is performed prior to other methods such as correlation or regression analysis. The results suggest a wide spectrum of human aspects to be studied in Software Engineering, and interesting potential for analysis by identifying interesting methods other than self-reporting. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.