More Like this

1. Engineering Gender-Inclusivity into Software: Ten Teams' Tales from the Trenches

   Claudia Hilderbrand, Christopher Perdriau (January 2020, ACM/IEEE Int. Conf. Software Engineering)

   Although the need for gender-inclusivity in software is gaining attention among SE researchers and SE practitioners, and at least one method (GenderMag) has been published to help, little has been reported on how to make such methods work in real-world settings. Real-world teams are ever-mindful of the practicalities of adding new methods on top of their existing processes. For example, how can they keep the time costs viable? How can they maximize impacts of using it? What about controversies that can arise in talking about gender? To find out how software teams “in the trenches” handle these and similar questions, we collected the GenderMag-based processes of 10 real-world software teams—more than 50 people—for periods ranging from 5 months to 3.5 years. We present these teams’ insights and experiences in the form of 9 practices, 2 potential pitfalls, and 2 open issues, so as to provide their insights to other real-world software teams trying to engineer gender-inclusivity into their software products. 

   more » « less
2. From GenderMag to InclusiveMag: An Inclusive Design Meta-Method

   https://doi.org/10.1109/VLHCC.2019.8818889  

   Mendez, Christopher; Letaw, Lara; Burnett, Margaret; Stumpf, Simone; Sarma, Anita; Hilderbrand, Claudia (October 2019, IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing)

   How can software practitioners assess whether their software supports diverse users? Although there are empirical processes that can be used to find “inclusivity bugs” piecemeal, what is often needed is a systematic inspection method to assess software's support for diverse populations. To help fill this gap, this paper introduces InclusiveMag, a generalization of GenderMag that can be used to generate systematic inclusiveness methods for a particular dimension of diversity. We then present a multicase study covering eight diversity dimensions, of eight teams' experiences applying InclusiveMag to eight under-served populations and their “mainstream” counterparts. 

   more » « less
3. AID: An automated detector for gender-inclusivity bugs in OSS project pages

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00128  

   Chatterjee, Amreeta; Guizani, Mariam; Stevens, Catherine; Emard, Jillian; May, Mary Evelyn; Burnett, Margaret; Ahmed, Iftekhar; Sarma, Anita (May 2021, IEEE/ACM 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE))

   null (Ed.)

   The tools and infrastructure used in tech, including Open Source Software (OSS), can embed “inclusivity bugs”— features that disproportionately disadvantage particular groups of contributors. To see whether OSS developers have existing practices to ward off such bugs, we surveyed 266 OSS developers. Our results show that a majority (77%) of developers do not use any inclusivity practices, and 92% of respondents cited a lack of concrete resources to enable them to do so. To help fill this gap, this paper introduces AID, a tool that automates the GenderMag method to systematically find gender-inclusivity bugs in software. We then present the results of the tool's evaluation on 20 GitHub projects. The tool achieved precision of 0.69, recall of 0.92, an F-measure of 0.79 and even captured some inclusivity bugs that human GenderMag teams missed. 

   more » « less
4. From GenderMag to InclusiveMag: An Inclusive Design Meta-Method

   Christopher Mendez, Lara Letaw (January 2019, IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing)

   How can software practitioners assess whether their software supports diverse users? Although there are empirical processes that can be used to find “inclusivity bugs” piecemeal, what is often needed is a systematic inspection method to assess software’s support for diverse populations. To help fill this gap, this paper introduces InclusiveMag, a generalization of Gender- Mag that can be used to generate systematic inclusiveness methods for a particular dimension of diversity. We then present a multicase study covering eight diversity dimensions, of eight teams’ experiences applying InclusiveMag to eight under-served populations and their “mainstream” counterparts. 

   more » « less
5. Can I Get a Word In? The Impact of Turn-Taking and Gender Engineering Design Students' Psychological Safety

   https://doi.org/10.1115/DETC2022-90010  

   O'Connell, A; Cole, C.; Mohammad, S.; Jablokow, K.; Miller, S. (August 2022, International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference)

   Psychological safety and turn-taking have both been listed as key factors needed for collaboration in teams to emerge. Specifically, prior work has shown that increased communication in teams can lead to high psychological safety. Prior work on turn-taking as a measure of communication has mostly focused on its inclusivity in a team rather than its frequency. While the gender composition of the team can impact both participation as well as team psychological safety, there is a lack of research at the individual level. As such, this study provides the first attempt at connecting turn-taking, gender, and psychological safety through the analysis of members of fifteen engineering design student teams during the concept generation stage of their project. Specifically, we gathered video data to study how the number of turns and self- turns in a team impact psychological safety at both the individual and the team levels. We also examined how gender impacts participation and individual perceptions of psychological safety. The results found that turns and self-turns have a significant positive impact on an individual’s perception of the team’s psychological safety. However, no such relationship was found at the team level, indicating that there may be additional underlying factors in team level psychological safety. While we found that gender did not impact individual turn-taking, it did affect an individual’s perception of their psychological safety. These results provide quantitative evidence of the role of team communication on psychological safety. 

   more » « less