How to Debug Inclusivity Bugs? A Debugging Process with Information Architecture
This addresses the gap in moving from finding to fixing inclusivity bugs for software developers, though it is incremental as it builds on prior work on finding such bugs.
The paper tackled the problem of fixing inclusivity bugs in software by introducing Why/Where/Fix, a systematic debugging process that uses Information Architecture for fault localization, resulting in a 90% reduction in inclusivity bugs experienced by OSS newcomers.
Although some previous research has found ways to find inclusivity bugs (biases in software that introduce inequities), little attention has been paid to how to go about fixing such bugs. Without a process to move from finding to fixing, acting upon such findings is an ad-hoc activity, at the mercy of the skills of each individual developer. To address this gap, we created Why/Where/Fix, a systematic inclusivity debugging process whose inclusivity fault localization harnesses Information Architecture(IA) -- the way user-facing information is organized, structured and labeled. We then conducted a multi-stage qualitative empirical evaluation of the effectiveness of Why/Where/Fix, using an Open Source Software (OSS) project's infrastructure as our setting. In our study, the OSS project team used the Why/Where/Fix process to find inclusivity bugs, localize the IA faults behind them, and then fix the IA to remove the inclusivity bugs they had found. Our results showed that using Why/Where/Fix reduced the number of inclusivity bugs that OSS newcomer participants experienced by 90%.