The pushback effects of race, ethnicity, gender, and age in code review

Abstract

Research shows that White, male, and younger engineers receive less pushback than those in other demographics.

Psychological Affordances Can Provide a Missing Explanatory Layer for Why Interventions to Improve Developer Experience Take Hold or Fail

“…This example highlights the crucial role that identity-relevant psychological context can play in teams' evaluation and awareness of how developers evaluate new technologies. This example also once again highlights the importance of learning culture, and how organizational "mindsets" around change and transformation can inadvertently signal mixed priorities to people (Murphy & Reeves, 2019). For example, securing the explicit endorsement of a teacher in a supposedly independent note was found to be necessary for an intervention telling students about the importance of working hard to produce an effect (Walton & Yeager, 2020).…”

“…Software research has documented that minoritized developers face systemically higher rates of "pushback, " unnecessarily hostile or critical rejections of technical work during code reviews (Murphy-Hill et al, 2022). This dynamic is alarming not only for the cost it exerts on an individual moment of work, but for the potential impact on developers' overall sense of belonging.…”

“…Will badges still produce communal engagement? (Murphy et al, 2020;Murphy-Hill et al, 2022) (3) Aiming to increase role-relevant learning and persistence in new skill-building among engineers, a developer experience team encourages leadership to purchase team licenses for a generative AI-assisted coding tool and set aside dedicated "learning time" for developers. However, the social norm within the engineering organization disparages time spent on learning as a detractor from "real coding, " developers fear sharing their early mistakes and experiments, and many developers in this organization have experienced identity-relevant threats from "AI"-based technologies.…”

The New Developer: AI Skill Threat, Identity Change & Developer Thriving in the Transition to AI-Assisted Software Development

“…In one example, within the social online communities that aggregate around technical knowledge, research has noted behaviors and expectations that affirm the perception of contest-dominated spaces (Catolino et al, 2019). In fact, research has recently cited the Brilliance Belief -Contest Culture cycle as a potential explanation for differences in code review pushback-unnecessary interpersonal conflict over a code change-and documented pervasive differences in the amount of code review pushback that developers receive depending on their gender, race and age (Murphy-Hill et al, 2022). However to our knowledge, research has not adapted measures for Brilliance Beliefs and Contest Culture for professional software teams and measured this directly.…”

A Human-Centered Approach to Developer Productivity

“…While one could argue that they constitute a "human problem," we can also mitigate such biases with tool changes, such as anonymous code reviews. 6 So to recap: developers are human, and thus the things that make being a human harder or easier also make being an engineer harder or easier. This isn't to say that there are no factors that specifically affect software developers more than they affect other humans.…”