Diversity and Inclusion in Software Engineering

Abstract

Community smells are patterns indicating suboptimal organization and communication of software development teams that have been shown to be related to suboptimal organisation of the source code. Given a long standing association of women and communication mediation, we have conducted a series of studies relating gender diversity to community smells, as well as comparing the results of the data analysis with developers' perception. To get further insights in the relation between gender and community smells, we replicate our study focusing on the Brazilian software teams; indeed, culture-specific expectations on the behavior of people of different genders might have affected the perception of the importance of gender diversity and refactoring strategies when mitigating community smells. Finally, we extend the prediction model by including variables related to national diversity and see how the interplay between national diversity and gender diversity influences presence of community smells.