Using Jungian Personality Types for Teaching Teamwork in a Software Engineering Capstone Course

This experience report describes the idea of making teammates aware of personality differences and its influence on team work. This is a topic that has relevance in any team work setting, in particular in Software Engineering (SE) where team work is central.

We augment the teaching of team work skills to tertiary SE students through the application of the Jungian personality types. We describe how we introduce the Jungian personality dimensions. We propose an innovative method to gather information about the personality preferences of our students. The method deviates from the usual as it does not use a personality inventory survey. Instead it relies on self-rating and observations made by peers.

We give an account of the activities we implement to instil understanding of the personality concepts associated with the Jungian personality types. We discuss how the students' participation in these activities helped them to apply these concepts to improve their interpersonal skills and teamwork skills. We discuss the implications of our observations. Our method to teaches students about differences between people using the Jungian personality types as a basis to highlight these differences and how they can capitalise on these differences. At the same time, knowledge of these differences help students who may feel different, because they gain awareness of the value of these differences. We conclude that the practicality of knowledge of the Jungian personality types is beneficial in our context.