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

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...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:2020 IEEE/ACM 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) pp. 433 - 444
Main Authors: Hilderbrand, Claudia, Perdriau, Christopher, Letaw, Lara, Emard, Jillian, Steine-Hanson, Zoe, Burnett, Margaret, Sarma, Anita
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: ACM 01.10.2020
Subjects:
GenderMag
Inclusive software
software engineering practices
ISSN:1558-1225
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary: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.
ISSN:1558-1225
DOI:10.1145/3377811.3380371