research-article

Gender diversity and women in software teams: how do they affect community smells?

Authors:

Gemma Catolino,

Damian A. Tamburri,

Alexander Serebrenik,

Filomena FerrucciAuthors Info & Claims

ICSE-SEIS '19: Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Society

Pages 11 - 20

https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE-SEIS.2019.00010

Published: 25 May 2019 Publication History

Abstract

As social as software engineers are, there is a known and established gender imbalance in our community structures, regardless of their open- or closed-source nature. To shed light on the actual benefits of achieving such balance, this empirical study looks into the relations between such balance and the occurrence of community smells, that is, sub-optimal circumstances and patterns across the software organizational structure. Examples of community smells are Organizational Silo effects (overly disconnected sub-groups) or Lone Wolves (defiant community members). Results indicate that the presence of women generally reduces the amount of community smells. We conclude that women are instrumental to reducing community smells in software development teams.

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cover image ACM Conferences

ICSE-SEIS '19: Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Society

May 2019

75 pages

Program Chairs:
Rick Kazman
University of Hawaii at Manoa & Carnegie Mellon University
,
Liliana Pasquale
University College Dublin and Lero, Ireland

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SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering
IEEE-CS: Computer Society

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IEEE Press

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Published: 25 May 2019

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ICSE '19: 41st International Conference on Software Engineering

May 25 - 31, 2019

Quebec, Montreal, Canada

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Jaccheri LDuc Ad'Amorim M(2024)Software Engineering and Gender: A TutorialCompanion Proceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3663529.3663818(704-706)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
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