Gender and Community Smells

Abstract: Community smells are patterns indicating suboptimal organization and communication of software development teams that have been shown to be related to suboptimal organisation of the source code. Given a long standing association of women and communication mediation, we have conducted a series of studies relating gender diversity to community smells, as well as comparing the results of the data analysis with developers' perception. To get further insights in the relation bwteen gender and community smells, we replicate our study focusing on the Brazilian software teams; indeed, culture-specific expectations on the behavior of people of different genders might have affected the perception of the importance of gender diversity and refactoring strategies when mitigating community smells. Finally, we extend the prediction model by including variables related to national diversity and see how the interplay between national diversity and gender diversity influences presence of community smells.

This talk is based on a series of papers published in 2019-2022 and co-authored with Gemma Catolino, Filomena Ferrucci, Stefano Lambiase, Tiago Massoni, Fabio Palomba, Camila Sarmento, and Damian Andrew Tamburri.

Bio: Alexander Serebrenik is a full professor of social software engineering at the Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. His research goal is to facilitate evolution of software by taking into account social aspects of software development. His work tends to involve theories and methods both from within computer science (e.g., theory of socio-technical coordination, methods from natural language processing, machine learning) and from outside of computer science (e.g., organisational psychology). He is actively involved in organisation of scientific conferences and is member of the editorial board of several journals. He has won multiple best paper and distinguished reviewer awards.

Engineering Inclusivity into Your Products

Abstract: Do you value diversity, equity, and inclusion in your institution? If so, are the products that you are creating equitable and inclusive for usage by diverse populations of users? The evidence suggests “no”—and this talk will consider how to address this problem by answering the following questions: How can you assess whether the products you create support diverse users? And if not, how can you fix them? I will then present an evaluation method, GenderMag, that you can use to find “inclusivity bugs” in the software, processes, or courseware that you create. In this talk, I’ll also present how different teams have been using GenderMag and their results.

Bio: Dr. Anita Sarma is an Associate Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine and was a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research aims to understand the cognitive processes of humans, and build inclusive technology to help users. Together with her collaborators and students she has co-authored more than 100 conference and journal articles, and has received numerous awards. She received the OSU Breaking Barriers Research award (2021) for her work in removing gender biases from software. She co-leads the GenderMag project and the SocioeconomicMag project.