Since the first major software engineering projects in the 1960’s, academia and industry have long viewed software requirements in technical, contractual, and abstract terms. In many contexts, this view has served us well: it got us to the moon, it gave us robust operating systems and programming languages, and after more than 50 years of developer effort, we have thriving ecosystems of carefully engineered software that powers the world. And yet, software still fails to meet the needs of people at the margins of society on every aspect of class, wealth, sex, gender, race, ethnicity, ability, and citizenship. While software engineering has made strides in the past decade to recognize the human, social, and organizational, and ethical dimensions of requirements, even our most recent views on this marginalization frame requirements engineering through the narrow lens of ethics, policy, and law.

In this talk, I challenge these framings of requirements, examining ways in which defining requirements through any lens other than one of justice can lead to marginalization, injustice, and oppression. I share the evolution of my own perspectives on requirements and oppression, then offer three case studies of how requirements come to be oppressive. I end by proposing an alternative lens that frames requirements engineering as an act of cultural production, one demanding a more critical and activist stance.

Amy J. Ko is a Professor at the University of Washington Information School and an Adjunct Professor at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering. She directs the Code & Cognition Lab, where she studies human aspects of programming. Her earliest work included techniques for automatically answering questions about program behavior to support debugging, program understanding, and reuse. Her later work studied interactions between developers and users, and techniques for web scale aggregation of user intent through help systems; she co-founded AnswerDash to commercialize these ideas. Her latest work investigates effective, equitable, scalable ways for humanity to learn computing, including programming languages, APIs, programming strategies, design, and machine learning. Her work spans over 100 peer-reviewed publications, 11 receiving best paper awards and 4 receiving most influential paper awards. She is an ACM Senior Member, and member of ACM SIGCHI, SIGCSE, and SIGSOFT. She received her Ph.D. at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in 2008, and degrees in Computer Science and Psychology with Honors from Oregon State University in 2002.