Gender Diversity and Community Smells: Insights From the Trenches

Abstract

While attention to gender diversity in software development teams is growing, it is not yet known whether practitioners see gender diversity as useful to mitigate undesirable communication patterns. In our previous study, we found, through the application of statistical models, a strictly connection between gender diversity and communication patterns, for this reason, we asked practitioners their opinion through the administration of a survey. We observed that while practitioners do not seem to consider gender diversity as being useful in this context, those practitioners who tend to motivate their considerations with their own professional experience. Moreover, participants highlighted that beside technical expertise, good communication skills are fundamental for developers within a software team and need to be carefully checked during the hiring process.

Perceived diversity in software engineering: a systematic literature review

“…Previous findings also report that (1) the majority of older adults claimed to have witnessed discrimination towards others in FLOSS, especially against non-native English speakers and women [SLR(Davidson et al 2014 )], (2) successful OSS women believe that having codes of conduct in the projects would help to increase and retain women and allies [SLR(Singh 2019b )], and (3) transgender developers have expressed discomfort when participating in Hackathons and they are concerned about LGBQTPhobia in these events [SLR(Prado et al 2020 )]. Similarly, studies related to the industrial work environment have found that (1) women are less satisfied with the spirit of their team at their company [SLR(James et al 2017 )], (2) 12.3% of the men admitted to having a conscious bias against women and 40.2% of women have felt gender discrimination during their career [SLR(Blincoe et al 2019 )], (3) developers perceived gender diversity of a team as being less important than developer experience or team size to mitigate community smells [SLR(Catolino et al 2019a )], (4) gender minorities in teams formed predominantly by men feel less included when the team uses audio channels or visual communication channels to discuss work [SLR(Hui and Farnham 2016 )], (5) transgender developers think that working remotely can foster a more inclusive environment as they can control their professional identity [SLR(Ford et al 2019 )], and (6) men or women software architects who exhibit “feminine expertise” 6 are perceived as successful when in dealing with software architecting’s human aspects [SLR(Razavian and Lago 2015 )].…”

Inter-team communication in large-scale co-located software engineering: a case study

“…Diversity in software engineering organisations, e.g. regarding gender and tenure, has been shown to support increased productivity (Vasilescu et al 2015) and may also facilitate communication within a software engineering organisation (Catolino et al 2020).…”

“…Our observations regarding the correlation between team size and ease of inter-team communication validate the findings of Bjørnson et al In their study, they identified a negative relationship between team size and interpersonal contacts and pose that this may contribute to the challenges of scaling agile methods (that rely on interpersonal communication) to large organisation (Bjørnson et al 2018). Similarly, Catolino et al also identified team size as a factor that can mitigate communication issues (Catolino et al 2020), though they provide no explanation on why or how, e.g. if small or large teams are more beneficial from an inter-team communication perspective.…”

Evolving software forges: An experience report from Apache Allura

“…The same authors later extended this work with a survey study involving practitioners, where they indicated that the gender-related considerations are not perceived as relevant indicators of community health. 48 More recently, Catolino et al 49 investigated the variability of community smells over time, pointing out the existence of community-related metrics that may serve as a monitoring system for establishing community health, as well as the "refactoring" strategies applied by practitioners when mitigating the effects of community smells, proposing a catalog of best practices. 50 When considering the impact of community smells on source code quality, Palomba et al 51 proposed a machine learning-based instrument that can estimate the harmfulness of code smells, that is, poor implementation choices in source code, 52 based on a combination of community smells, socio-technical metrics, and code quality factors.…”