Female Student Participation in Software Engineering Projects: Opportunities to Model Project Evaluation and to Improve Early Prediction of Teamwork Failure

Software engineering project is the preferred mean to measure competency and practical skills among learners in IT-fields. This study investigates the opportunities to model software engineering project final evaluation and improve early prediction of academic software engineering project failure by considering female student participation as a teamwork member, regardless of being a teamwork leader or a teamwork regular member. Four distinct arrangements of software engineering development teamwork are advised and studied. Those arrangements range from female-less participation teamwork to female-dominated participation teamwork. Machine learning techniques are leveraged to build prediction models. Teams are evaluated from two distinct perspectives. First, software products submitted at the end of each project life cycle milestone, namely product perspective. Second, the degree of obeying the good practices of software engineering project development, namely process perspective. Results reveal significant differences due to female student participation. Arrangement of female-less participation attains the worst modeling and prediction performance compared to the other arrangements of female student participation. Keywords: Gender diversity, E-learning, Software engineering, Project failure, Machine learning DOI: 10.7176/JEP/11-35-06 Publication date: December 31st 2020

Diversity in Software Engineering Conferences and Journals

Diversity with respect to ethnicity and gender has been studied in open-source and industrial settings for software development. Publication avenues such as academic conferences and journals contribute to the growing technology industry. However, there have been very few diversity-related studies conducted in the context of academia. In this paper, we study the ethnic, gender, and geographical diversity of the authors published in Software Engineering conferences and journals. We provide a systematic quantitative analysis of the diversity of publications and organizing and program committees of three top conferences and two top journals in Software Engineering, which indicates the existence of bias and entry barriers towards authors and committee members belonging to certain ethnicities, gender, and/or geographical locations in Software Engineering conferences and journal publications. For our study, we analyse publication (accepted authors) and committee data (Program and Organizing committee/ Journal Editorial Board) from the conferences ICSE, FSE, and ASE and the journals IEEE TSE and ACM TOSEM from 2010 to 2022. The analysis of the data shows that across participants and committee members, there are some communities that are consistently significantly lower in representation, for example, publications from countries in Africa, South America, and Oceania. However, a correlation study between the diversity of the committees and the participants did not yield any conclusive evidence. Furthermore, there is no conclusive evidence that papers with White authors or male authors were more likely to be cited. Finally, we see an improvement in the ethnic diversity of the authors over the years 2010-2022 but not in gender or geographical diversity.Comment: 13 pages, 10 figures, 4 table

Gender-Based Perspectives of eLearning Systems: An Empirical Study of Social Sustainability

Digital technologies have an increasing impact on our everyday life. A large impact of software engineering on society also means that socio-cultural factors are becoming crucial for software systems. The gender and cultural diversity have significant impact not only on the software development process but also on the overall sustainability of the software as well as on the society where the software is used. Thus, these diversity aspects should be analysed while developing a software system. This paper presents an empirical study that investigates the gender and cultural differences in needs and usage of system features. Our focus is on eLearning systems used in Australia and Saudi Arabia, but the results of the study might be expanded to other application domains. To explore the differences, we applied a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods on the data collected from 177 participants. The results demonstrated the cultural and gender diversity may have a significant impact on user needs and preferences

Gender Differences in Personality Traits of Software Engineers

There is a growing body of gender studies in software engineering to understand diversity and inclusion issues, as diversity is recognized to be a key issue to healthy teams and communities. A second factor often linked to team performance is personality, which has received far more attention. Very few studies, however, have focused on the intersection of these two fields. Hence, we set out to study gender differences in personality traits of software engineers. Through a survey study we collected personality data, using the HEXACO model, of 483 software engineers. The data were analyzed using a Bayesian independent sample t-test and network analysis. The results suggest that women score significantly higher in Openness to Experience, Honesty-Humility, and Emotionality than men. Further, men show higher psychopathic traits than women. Based on these findings, we develop a number of propositions that can guide future research

A comparative study of cloud services use by prospective IT professionals in five countries

Individuals and organizations utilise the cloud technology and its services in various ways. Cloud-based services are becoming increasingly popular, while there is no adequate knowledge offered for their secure use in the education for future IT professionals. It is important to understand how security and privacy issues are perceived and handled by male/female users and IT professionals of different cultures. The authors aim at presenting and scrutinizing information about cloud services’ use by prospective IT professionals in five countries, namely China, Finland, Greece, Nepal, and the UK. In particular the authors, wanting to find out what are the future IT professionals’ conceptualisations and awareness, collected data from male and female IT students in higher education, who use (or not) cloud services. The authors further illustrate the research findings by proceeding to a comparative analysis considering different perspectives such as: gender, education background, national culture (values and culture), and IT-related knowledge. The final research outcomes reveal attention-grabbing information for future IT professionals’ skills, knowledge, and digital competencies. For the IT professionals and software quality engineering communities the latter comprise a body of realistic knowledge, worthy of note when designing curricula for security technology by accommodating practical and accessible solutions (e.g., cryptography-based cloud security) for developing and enhancing the IT professionals’ role