Cognitive Abilities and Performance in Database Design: An Observational Study

Database Design is a complex socio-technical activity. In this type of tasks, individual developer's characteristics often play an important role on their performance. Objective: To study the impact of a subset of cognitive abilities (Abstract Reasoning, Verbal Reasoning and General Intelligence) on the performance of developers during Entity-Relationship modelling tasks. Method: Based on a theoretical model that has been extracted from the literature, we designed an observational study with 33 subjects from the University of Ecuador. After a 30-hour training, the subjects were measured both in terms of their cognitive profile and their Entity-Relationship modelling performance. For the analysis of the data, subjects were divided into three groups according to their performance (high, medium, low) and their mean cognitive scores were compared with a one-way ANOVA. Results: The study shows how the General Intelligence is a clearly discriminant factor with respect to subjects' performance during database modelling tasks. In the same line, Abstract Reasoning is clearly superior in subjects in the high-performance group, although this difference does not appear to hold between the medium and low-performance groups. Verbal Reasoning, on the other hand, does not seem to be related with Entity-Relationship design performance. Conclusions: Our data supports the hypothesis that certain cognitive abilities are related with better performance levels in Software Engineering critical activities such as database design. Therefore, measuring and training those abilities may have a positive effect on their future professional performance.