Failure to account for human values in software (e.g., equality and fairness)
can result in user dissatisfaction and negative socio-economic impact.
Engineering these values in software, however, requires technical and
methodological support throughout the development life cycle. This paper
investigates to what extent software engineering (SE) research has considered
human values. We investigate the prevalence of human values in recent (2015 -
2018) publications at some of the top-tier SE conferences and journals. We
classify SE publications, based on their relevance to different values, against
a widely used value structure adopted from social sciences. Our results show
that: (a) only a small proportion of the publications directly consider values,
classified as relevant publications; (b) for the majority of the values, very
few or no relevant publications were found; and (c) the prevalence of the
relevant publications was higher in SE conferences compared to SE journals.
This paper shares these and other insights that motivate research on human
values in software engineering
