Tom's people skills to deal with the customers (34)

Have you ever seen Office Space? The movie, a comedy, appeared in 1999 and is largely based on the dull office life. The protagonist in this movie is Peter Gibbons who works as a programmer for Initech, a company that makes software for banks, actually they are busy updating software for the 2000 switch. The Initech company is reorganising and has called in help from two consultants, Bob Slydell and Bob Porter. One of my favourite scenes is where Bob and Bob are interviewing Tom Smykowski, who seems to be a requirements engineer, although the name of his function is never mentioned. The scene starts with the question: "So what you do is you take the specifications from the customers and you bring them down to the software engineers?" (To be honest, I've seen this scene so often that I hadn't even to look up the exact text on the internet).

Bob and Bob are not convinced that what Tom does is useful. One of them asks why the customers don't bring the specifications to the software engineers themselves. The conversation moves on a bit and Tom feels he is being attacked and is annoyed to say the least. The most fascinating thing he says, or rather shouts, at the end of the scene is: "I deal with the customers so the engineers don't have to! I have people skills!"

Tom's function, an analyst who acts as an intermediary between customers and developers, may be a very important one. In an other environment he might also be called a requirements engineer or maybe a product owner. Tom's statement that he has people skills seems to imply that the engineers don't. I think I recognize that but it made me wonder if that is actually true. Do developers really differ from requirements engineers, customers, and testers with respect to their personality traits?

Luis Martínez et al. (2011) think they do. In their investigations, among other methods, they used a Big Five test to establish the personality traits of 80 people with different roles in a software development process. These roles comprised analysts (requirements engineers), developers, testers, architects, documenters and presenters (responsible for sales and distribution). Using a Big Five test, the participants were rated on five personality traits (hence the name 'Big Five'): openness (also referred to as intellect), conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (or its opposite: emotional stability). From the results they conclude that developers are typically introverted but agreeable, and analysts are more extroverted and conscientious. Moreover analysts seem to be less neurotic than developers. Testers have more or less the same personality traits as analysts.

Although the article doesn't mention the statistical reliability of the research, the results seem to support Tom's point of view (remember Tom, from Office Space): analysts (and testers) have on average 'better' people skills than developers. The authors conclude that it is important to know these personality traits as this can facilitate the role assignment process and the selection of candidates for software engineering jobs.

Unfortunately there aren't any software testers in Office Space, as far as I remember. I am however not entirely sure about that. There is this one guy called Michael Bolton, who stresses that he is not related to the singer. He doesn't say anything about one of the founders of Rapid Software Testing with the exact same name.?

One final remark for Office Space enthusiasts. At the moment of writing the Swingline 747 Business Stapler is still available in the colour Rio Red. Just saying.

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References?

Martinez, L. G., Castro, J. R., Licea, G., Rodriguez-Diaz, A., Alvarez, C.F., (2011) Knowing software engineer's personality to improve software development, ICSOFT 2011 - 6th International Conference on Software and Data Technologies

This article is an article in the series about the versatile profession of requirements engineering. Every week a colleague of?Improve Quality Services?will share with the reader an aspect of requirements engineer from daily experience. Every article begins with a picture of a bridge. The bridge visualizes connecting two sides. In requirements engineering connecting different stakeholders assisting the stakeholders in collaboration and communication about requirements.

Articles published till date (mostly in Dutch):

1.?Requirements?(Piet de Roo, December 1, 2020)

2.?Shared Understanding?(Kaspar van Dam, December 8, 2020)

3.?Context en requirements structuur?(Patrick Duisters, December 15, 2020)

4.?Van Twin Peaks naar Twin Pines?(Patrick Duisters, December 22, 2020)

5.?Modellen om te bouwen?(Erwin Pasmans, January 5, 2021)

6.?Minimaal Modelleren?(Piet de Roo, January 12 2021)

7.?Begrip en Vertrouwen?(Benjamin Timmermans, January 19, 2021)

8.?En wat als de specialisten het niet met elkaar eens zijn??(Benjamin Timmermans, January 26, 2021)

9.?Waar zijn we nou helemaal mee bezig?!?(Erwin Pasmans, February 2, 2021)

10.?Soft skills? Keiharde wetenschap!?(Kaspar van Dam, February 9, 2021)

11.?… en nu enkele feiten: Requirement Attributen?(Patrick Duisters, February 16, 2021)

12.?Waarom, waarom, waarom, ...?(Piet de Roo, February 23, 2021)

13.?Een leven lang zorgen?(Erwin Pasmans, March 2, 2021)

14.?Casus: Requirements management bij een distributiecentrum in aanbouw?(Eduard Hartog, March 11, 2021)

15.?Iteratief versus Incrementeel?(Kaspar van Dam, March 16, 2021)

16.?Requirements of-the-shelf: geen maatwerk, geen requirements??(Erwin Pasmans, March 23, 2021)

17.?Creatief door constraints?(Piet de Roo, March 30, 2021)

18.?3 Amigo’s?(Patrick Duisters, April 13, 2021)

19.?4 Amigos (of meer?)?(Patrick Duisters, April 20, 2021)

20.?Requirements, de CoronaCheck-app en Fred Flintstone?(Benjamin Timmermans, April 28, 2021)

21.?Meer kapiteins op 1 schip (of staan de beste stuurlui aan wal)??(Erwin Pasmans, May 4, 2021)

22.?Hoe SMART is SMART??(Benjamin Timmermans, May 11, 2021)

23.?Jip en Janneke?(Piet de Roo, May 18, 2021)

24.?Laten we het simpel houden?(Patrick Duisters, May 25, 2021)

25.?Dilemma's?(Erwin Pasmans, June 1, 2021)

26.?Living Documentation Event 2021?(Kaspar van Dam, June 8, 2021)

27.?Non-functional Requirements?(Patrick Duisters, June 15, 2021)

28.?The Big Shift?(Kaspar van Dam, June 22, 2021)

29.?Why do we have these problems over and over again??(Erwin Pasmans, June 29, 2021)

30.?Non-functionals, who cares??(Benjamin Timmermans, July 6, 2021)

31.?Usability and UX, a revelation I had?(Benjamin Timmermans, July 13, 2021)

32.?How??(Piet de Roo, July 20, 2021)

33. Requirements and design? (Erwin Pasmans, July 27, 2021)