Engineering Gender-Inclusivity into Software: Tales from the Trenches
This addresses the challenge of applying gender-inclusivity methods in practical software engineering settings, offering incremental guidance for teams.
The study investigated how real-world software teams implement gender-inclusivity methods, identifying 12 practices and 3 pitfalls from 10 teams to provide practical insights for practitioners.
Although the need for gender-inclusivity in software itself is gaining attention among both SE researchers and SE practitioners, and methods have been published to help, little has been reported on how to make such methods work in real-world settings. For example, how do busy software practitioners use such methods in low-cost ways? How do they endeavor to maximize benefits from using them? How do they avoid the controversies that can arise in talking about gender? To find out how teams were handling these and similar questions, we turned to 10 real-world software teams. We present these teams experiences "in the trenches," in the form of 12 practices and 3 potential pitfalls, so as to provide their insights to other real-world software teams trying to engineer gender-inclusivity into their software products.