On the Economic Implications of Diversity in Software Engineering
It addresses a gap in software engineering research by focusing on economic aspects of diversity, providing preliminary insights for practitioners and organizations, but it is incremental as it builds on existing socio-technical studies.
This paper investigates how software professionals perceive the economic implications of diversity in software engineering teams, finding that diversity is viewed as economically relevant through associations with cost reduction, revenue generation, and innovation, based on interviews with ten practitioners.
This paper investigates how software professionals perceive the economic implications of diversity in software engineering teams. Motivated by a gap in software engineering research, which has largely emphasized socio-technical and process-related outcomes, we adopted a qualitative interview approach to capture practitioners' reasoning about diversity in relation to economic and market-oriented considerations. Based on interviews with ten software professionals, our analysis indicates that diversity is perceived as economically relevant through its associations with cost reduction and containment, revenue generation, time to market, process efficiency, innovation, and market alignment. Participants typically grounded these perceptions in concrete project experiences rather than abstract economic reasoning, framing diversity as a practical resource that supports project delivery, competitiveness, and organizational viability. Our findings provide preliminary empirical insights into how economic aspects of diversity are understood in software engineering practice.