English

Engineering Gender-Inclusivity into Software: Tales from the Trenches

Software Engineering 2019-05-28 v1 Computers and Society

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1905.10361,
  title  = {Engineering Gender-Inclusivity into Software: Tales from the Trenches},
  author = {Claudia Hilderbrand and Christopher Perdriau and Lara Letaw and Jillian Emard and Zoe Steine-Hanson and Margaret Burnett and Anita Sarma},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.10361},
  year   = {2019}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T09:22:53.190Z