A Study on the Prevalence of Human Values in Software Engineering Publications, 2015-2018
It highlights a gap in addressing human values in software engineering research, which is crucial for preventing user dissatisfaction and socio-economic harm, though it is incremental as it builds on existing value structures from social sciences.
This study investigated the extent to which software engineering research from 2015-2018 considered human values like fairness, finding that only a small proportion of publications directly addressed values, with many values having few or no relevant publications.
Failure to account for human values in software (e.g., equality and fairness) can result in user dissatisfaction and negative socio-economic impact. Engineering these values in software, however, requires technical and methodological support throughout the development life cycle. This paper investigates to what extent software engineering (SE) research has considered human values. We investigate the prevalence of human values in recent (2015 - 2018) publications at some of the top-tier SE conferences and journals. We classify SE publications, based on their relevance to different values, against a widely used value structure adopted from social sciences. Our results show that: (a) only a small proportion of the publications directly consider values, classified as relevant publications; (b) for the majority of the values, very few or no relevant publications were found; and (c) the prevalence of the relevant publications was higher in SE conferences compared to SE journals. This paper shares these and other insights that motivate research on human values in software engineering.