Diversity and collaboration are critical elements that shape innovation within open source projects. Research shows that diversity brings broader perspectives and more creative solutions, yet it can cause unique challenges, such as higher levels of conflict and the need for effective resolution strategies. Understanding how diverse contributors interact and collaborate is essential for creating an inclusive open source community that retains minorities and leverages the benefits of diversity. In this paper, we report from a case study of a large open source project, React.js. Using a mixed-methods approach, we analyzed contributor discussions in 4,211 pull requests and 26,681 individual comments in the last ten years (117 versions). We identify themes in the contributors’ collaboration, leveraging both manual and automated approaches, and observe that more diverse, collaborative groups that experience conflict work together longer, and merge more pull requests than groups without conflict. Our longitudinal analysis of collaborations spanning multiple versions indicates that they did not experience contributor attrition and appear to have successfully navigated conflict through higher levels of inquisitive and interdependent behavior. A deeper qualitative analysis of conflictual conversations allows us to reflect on how psychological safety may have allowed teams to engage in "productive conflict" and leverage contrasting perspectives in diverse collaboration. Our work brings timely insights into how diverse contributors interact in open-source projects, with potential implications to managing collaboration in diverse open-source communities.

Creative approaches to attract students to software engineering at an early age are emerging, yet their differential impact on gender remains unclear. This study investigates whether design thinking's empathy-driven approach addresses the documented gender gap in interest in software engineering. In a 10-week curriculum-integrated design thinking software development course with 55 secondary school students aged 13-15 from two schools in Canada, we examined gendered differences in perceived gains in knowledge and interest, as well as in social-emotional experiences. Our results show that both girls and boys gained perceived knowledge in software development. However, girls showed significant improvements in self-efficacy, interest, engagement with sustainability topics, and well-being, including optimism, sense of usefulness, and social connectedness. Positive emotions were strongest during creative, collaborative phases, while technical tasks led to some boredom, especially among boys, though they still benefited overall. This suggests that human-centred design thinking might be one effective way to address gender equity challenges, though we need more differentiated technical implementations.

Engagement in teamwork is a critical success factor in software development teams, where collaboration and communication are paramount. Research consistently highlights the positive impact of high engagement on a team’s overall performance and project outcomes. However, we are still missing an in-depth understanding of how engagement occurs in teamwork. In this study we used design science as an approach to observe new multicultural agile teams for four months, collect data through interviews, a survey, and observations, and develop a framework of the factors that impact engagement in teamwork. Our research aims to help teams understand how the engagement in teamwork occurs in multicultural agile teams to deal with the multicultural aspects and towards improved team performance.

In an era of rapidly expanding software usage, catering to the diverse needs of users from various backgrounds has become a critical challenge. Inclusiveness, representing a core human value, is frequently overlooked during software development, leading to user dissatisfaction. Users often engage in discourse on online platforms where they indicate their concerns. In this study, we leverage user feedback from three popular online sources Reddit, Google Play Store, and X, for 50 of the most popular apps in the world. Using a Socio-Technical Grounded Theory approach, we analyzed 22,000 posts across the three sources. We organize our empirical results in a taxonomy for inclusiveness comprising 5 major categories: Algorithmic Bias, Technology, Demography, Accessibility, and Other Human Values. To explore automated support for identifying inclusiveness-related posts, we experimented with a large language model (GPT4o-mini) and found that it is capable of identifying inclusiveness-related user feedback. We provide implications and recommendations that can help software practitioners to better identify inclusiveness issues to support a wider range of users

Women in Software Engineering often face challenges that go beyond workplace obstacles faced by well represented groups in the sector. For example, research results show that they are affected by sexism and harassment, are assigned to menial tasks and have to prove themselves more frequently than other groups. Previous studies propose allyship as a way to mitigate these challenges. Allyship is the support given by people in more privileged positions to underrepresented group members in order to overcome workplace challenges. We interviewed 17 women software practitioners and 8 of their allies on their recommendations for organizations to implement and strengthen allyship. We found three main areas to strengthen allyship in organizations: learning and network initiatives, organizational structures and organizational culture. Our findings can support software companies in establishing or further supporting their allyship programs by showing recommendations derived directly from software practitioners.

Non-functional requirements (NFR) such as performance and maintainability are key to overall software quality. To ensure NFRs can be satisfied, it is important that developers and other stakeholders have a shared understanding of such NFRs to prevent divergence of interpretations and expensive rework as a result. This article is part of a research program to study the management of shared understanding of NFRs. We present a process theory comprising six propositions developed through secondary analysis of extensive field investigations of how small software organizations maintain a shared understanding of NFRs in fast-paced Continuous Software Engineering (CSE) contexts. Small organizations, including software startups, represent an important part of the software industry, but are categorically different from large organizations in that they have fewer financial and staff resources. Further, while literature has suggested general practices for building shared understanding, how this applies to NFRs specifically remains an open question. Based on this inductive theory development, the resultant theory explains how a lack of shared understanding is detected and addressed, and how the CSE context induces challenges in these processes.

Context: Software increasingly shapes daily life, making requirements engineering (RE) essential for ensuring systems contribute to community social sustainability. Yet automated elicitation practices risk distancing RE from the cultural, social, and political contexts that inform user needs, systematically excluding the communities most dependent on socially impactful software. AI-assisted RE has intensified this trend. Objective: This paper introduces REConnect, a human-centered participatory RE framework that recenters requirements work on human connection and relationality as the foundation for understanding lived experiences and ensuring alignment with community values and aspirations. Methods: REConnect was derived through qualitative analysis of 26 community-engaged software projects conducted through the INSPIRE program at the University of Victoria between 2022 and 2025, spanning rural Nepal, urban Canada, and remote Arctic Canada. We conducted a reflective synthesis across all 26 projects, followed by in-depth thematic analysis of three illustrative projects. Results: Three core principles are articulated: building trusting relationships, co-creating with and alongside stakeholders, and empowering users as agents of change. Each is operationalized through actionable REConnect Actions (REActions) embedding relationality and continuous stakeholder engagement throughout the project lifecycle. Conclusions: REConnect positions human connection as the foundation of RE for socio-technical systems aiming toward social sustainability. While AI can accelerate certain RE activities, its integration must be governed by participatory principles that preserve human agency and ensure marginalized voices are not excluded. We discuss how REConnect integrates with AI support while maintaining critical human agency in requirements engineering.

This study explores collaborative learning as a DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) strategy to reduce the attrition of minorities from STEM education through the lens of psychological safety and empathy. We analyzed two years' worth of weekly student reflections, and student, and community partner interviews. Our findings reveal that psychological safety is crucial for fostering open communication and creativity within teams, yet establishing it can be challenging within a short time. Empathy towards end-users and team members significantly enhances project development but often competes with the need for efficiency, particularly as deadlines approach. Increased confidence among students, driven by mentorship, social bonds, and skill development, emerged as a key positive outcome. Based on these insights, we recommend that educators implement early team-building activities, empathy training, flexible expectations, and strong mentorship programs to create a supportive and effective collaborative learning environment. These strategies can help improve team experiences and project success, particularly for minority students in engineering programs.

Research suggests that diversity in software teams can potentially lead to higher team performance. In practice, while diverse teams benefit from varying perspectives and higher creativity and productivity, they are also at a greater risk of inter-team conflict and challenges in resolving differences especially in contexts of uncertainty typical to many software projects. In this paper we report empirical evidence and propose a framework that explains moderating factors that support the relationship between team diversity and performance in software development teams. We studied six heterogeneous, student-development teams in 4-month long, community-driven projects with realistic constraints, timelines and stakeholder management experiences. We report the diversity in the project teams in terms of educational background, gender and cultural backgrounds, and examine team member satisfaction and client satisfaction to understand team performance. Our results indicate that previously established factors such as task complexity, as well as emergent factors such as the ability to gain practical skills, manage emotions, and overcome hardship potentially help to moderate the relationship between the diversity and performance of the teams in our study. Additionally we find that the role of an underlying concept, empathy appears central in the moderation of diversity and performance. We use self-determination theory to explain how the emergent moderating factors we identify can create a sense of autonomy, relatedness and competence in software teams. Our findings do not explain the relationship between team diversity and team performance in its entirety, or with absolute certainty. However, they enhance the understanding of diversity-performance link in software development, offering insights for software engineering education, research, and practice.

Software is now deeply embedded in every aspect of society, shaping how we live, work, and connect. As a result, understanding users and their interactions with technology has never been more critical. While user-centered approaches, and particularly participatory approaches, have long been a cornerstone of requirements engineering, today’s increasingly digital world—driven by online interactions, automation, and AI—raises new challenges. How effectively can we engage with users and stakeholders to understand the complexity of their lived experiences, and how the software we design might impact them? Are we truly equipped to grasp their values, preferences, and needs—–especially when these are deeply rooted in diverse backgrounds, cultures, and life experiences?

Many university courses are moving from traditional paper-based assessments to computer-based tests with automated grading. This change could lead to increased student test anxiety but because the ease of grading facilitates frequent smaller-stakes assessments, it may reduce test anxiety particularly over the course of a semester as students become familiar with the test platform. This study examines the roles of test anxiety, self-efficacy, and academic performance, leveraging an in-person, supervised, computer-based testing approach. We measure each of these variables for 173 CS1 students over five unit quizzes and one final exam. We find no significant correlation between test anxiety and performance for the men or the women, while self-efficacy correlates moderately with performance for the men. Despite higher anxiety and lower self-efficacy, the women achieved comparable academic outcomes to the men. These results challenge traditional views on the impact of test anxiety on academic performance, highlighting the need for deeper investigation into these phenomena.

User feedback has grown in importance for organizations to improve software products. Prior studies focused primarily on feedback collection and reported a high-level overview of the processes, often overlooking how practitioners reason about, and act upon this feedback through a structured set of activities. In this work, we conducted an exploratory interview study with 40 practitioners from 32 organizations of various sizes and in several domains such as e-commerce, analytics, and gaming. Our findings indicate that organizations leverage many different user feedback sources. Social media emerged as a key category of feedback that is increasingly critical for many organizations. We found that organizations actively engage in a number of non-trivial activities to curate and act on user feedback, depending on its source. We synthesize these activities into a life cycle of managing user feedback. We also report on the best practices for managing user feedback that we distilled from responses of practitioners who felt that their organization effectively understood and addressed their users' feedback. We present actionable empirical results that organizations can leverage to increase their understanding of user perception and behavior for better products thus reducing user attrition.

AI assistance tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini have dramatically impacted the nature of software development in recent years. Numerous studies have studied the positive benefits that practitioners have achieved from using these tools in their work. While there is a growing body of knowledge regarding the usability aspects of leveraging AI tools, we still lack concrete details on the issues that organizations and practitioners need to consider should they want to explore increasing adoption or use of AI tools. In this study, we conducted a mixed methods study involving interviews with 26 industry practitioners and 395 survey respondents. We found that there are several motives and challenges that impact individuals and organizations and developed a theory of AI Tool Adoption. For example, we found creating a culture of sharing of AI best practices and tips as a key motive for practitioners' adopting and using AI tools. In total, we identified 2 individual motives, 4 individual challenges, 3 organizational motives, and 3 organizational challenges, and 3 interleaved relationships. The 3 interleaved relationships act in a push-pull manner where motives pull practitioners to increase the use of AI tools and challenges push practitioners away from using AI tools.

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing shift away from co-located work arrangements towards working from home, practitioners encountered many collabora-tive and coordination challenges. While companies are slowly moving back towards in-person arrangements, many employers have permanently adopted fully remote and hybrid work modes. However, the work modes are more blurred, as hybrid work makes coordinating the requirements engineering practices that rely on rich interactions more challenging. Therefore, gaining more understanding of RE challenges and practices from prac-titioners transitioning to the new modes of work is imperative to identify insights that can be useful for organizations shifting to hybrid and remote work. In this paper, we use a mixed-methods approach to gain insights into remote and hybrid requirements engineering practices and challenges in the industry. Through interviews with 12 industry practitioners and a survey with 49 practitioners, we report on 7 adopted practices and 7 challenges encountered in these work arrangements. We found challenges such as organizing co-located tasks, lack of interpersonal con-nections, keeping everyone in the loop, and engagement barriers, which fall under coordination, communication and collaboration. To offset such challenges, we provide 20 recommendations based on our findings, such as proactive planning and using newer tools that support comprehensive tracking of important knowl-edge for requirements documentation. Our findings suggest that practitioners are facing challenges in remote and hybrid work arrangements, which they are mitigating with various strategies. Nonetheless, there remains a need for further research, as not all challenges are equally addressed across different work contexts.

Retaining diverse, underrepresented students in computer science and software engineering programs is a significant concern for universities. In this chapter, we describe the INSPIRE: STEM for Social Impact program at the University of Victoria, Canada, which leverages the three principles of self-determination theory competence, relatedness, and autonomy in the design of strategies to empower women and other underrepresented groups in using software and other engineering solutions to approach sustainability, community-driven problems. We also describe lessons learned from a first successful year that involved over 30 students, 6 community partners (sustainability problem owners), and over 20 industry and academic mentors and reached out to more than 200 solution end users in our communities. Finally, we provide recommendations for universities and organizations who may want to adopt our approach. In the program 24 diverse students (in terms of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, academic standing, and background) divided into six teams paired with six community partners worked on solving society impactful problems and developed solutions for a number of respective community partners. Each team was supported by an experienced upper year student and mentors from industry and community throughout the program. The experiential learning approach of the program allowed the students to learn a variety of soft and technical skills while developing a solution that has a social and/or environmental impact. Having a diverse team and creating a solution for real end users motivated the students to actively collaborate with their peers, community partners, and mentors resulting in the development of an inclusive network. A network of like minded people is crucial in empowering underrepresented individuals and inspiring them to remain in the computer science and software engineering fields.

This chapter presents, from our research on inclusive software within the context of a diversity and inclusion based STEM program at the University of Victoria, INSPIRE: STEM for Social Impact (hereafter Inspire). In a society with an ever increasing reliance on technology, we often neglect the fact that software development processes and practices unintentionally marginalize certain groups of end users. While the Inspire program and its first iteration in 2022 are described in detail in CHAPTER 26, here we describe our insights from an analysis of the development processes and practices used by the teams. We found that empathy-based requirements gathering techniques and certain influences on the software development teams' motivation levels impact the teams' ability to build inclusive software. This chapter begins with an explanation of the Inspire program and a discussion on what the term ``inclusive software'' actually means in our context before highlighting useful practices for designing inclusive software.

Online user feedback has become an essential mechanism for software organizations to gain insight into user concerns and to recognize areas for improvement. In software platform ecosystems, staying abreast of user feedback is particularly challenging due to the multitude of feedback channels and the complex interplay with third party applications. In this paper we report from a mixed-method study of user feedback from over 40,000 relevant reviews from 139 SECO platforms out of 2.4 million online user reviews scraped from 283 retrieved SECO platforms. Through thematic analysis and machine learning classifiers with high accuracy, we identified and analyzed six categories of user challenges in the areas of Integration, Customer Support, Design & Complexity, Privacy & Security, Cost & Pricing, and Performance & Compatibility. Our analysis also shows a significant growth of SECO user feedback in the past five years, highlighting the importance of understanding such user feedback as well as research methodologies to automatically study online user concerns in software ecosystems. To further understand mitigation strategies for challenges reported by end users, we interviewed four executives from large ecosystems and describe strategies in addressing those identified challenges. This research is a first large scale study of user feedback in software ecosystems; the categories of user concerns are hopefully useful in guiding platforms in designing and fostering better software ecosystems. Our methodology for automatically classifying the user feedback that is SECO-related can also serve as guidance for future studies that can further advance our understanding of user feedback and how to integrate it into improved software ecosystems.

In our increasingly diverse digital landscape, under-standing and accommodating the needs of various user groups is crucial. Our research paper investigates the understanding and practices that developers have of considering diversity dimensions within their user base, in terms of Race and Ethnicity, Gender, Disability, Neurodiversity, and Age. In this research preview, we report on a preliminary mixed-method study that used an online questionnaire and interviews to collect input on developers' perceptions and measures for considering user diversity and inclusion (D&I) in the products they develop. Our findings indicate that developers from some underrepresented groups tend to exhibit greater awareness of user diversity, and their membership might have a positive effect on their team and company's perception of D&I. Our study highlights the need to enhance developer empathy and broaden their awareness about diversity. This research highlights the pivotal role of developers in creating inclusive software and underscores the importance of integrating diversity and inclusion principles into software development processes for a more representative and inclusive digital environment.