Challenges for Inclusion in Software Engineering: The Case of the Emerging Papua New Guinean Society
This work addresses inclusion challenges for software engineering in an emerging society (Papua New Guinea), though it appears incremental as it applies established qualitative methods to a new context.
This paper identifies challenges and opportunities for Papua New Guinea's entry into the global software industry through a qualitative study involving workshops, questionnaires, and focus groups. The research characterizes barriers and opportunities for the local software engineering community and discusses inclusive practices for practitioners, researchers, and educators.
Software plays a central role in modern societies, with its high economic value and potential for advancing societal change. In this paper, we characterise challenges and opportunities for a country progressing towards entering the global software industry, focusing on Papua New Guinea (PNG). By hosting a Software Engineering workshop, we conducted a qualitative study by recording talks (n=3), employing a questionnaire (n=52), and administering an in-depth focus group session with local actors (n=5). Based on a thematic analysis, we identified challenges as barriers and opportunities for the PNG software engineering community. We also discuss the state of practices and how to make it inclusive for practitioners, researchers, and educators from both the local and global software engineering community.