Designing for Cognitive Diversity: Improving the GitHub Experience for Newcomers
Social coding platforms such as GitHub have become defacto environments for collaborative programming and open source. When these platforms do not support specific cognitive styles, they create barriers to programming for some populations. Research shows that the cognitive styles typically favored by women are often unsupported, creating barriers to entry for woman newcomers. In this paper, we use the GenderMag method to evaluate GitHub to find cognitive style-specific inclusivity bugs. We redesigned the “buggy” GitHub features through a web browser plugin, which we evaluated through a between-subjects experiment (n=75). Our results indicate that the changes to the interface improve users’ performance and self-efficacy, mainly for individuals with cognitive styles more common to women. Our results can inspire designers of social coding platforms and software engineering tools to produce more inclusive development environments.
Wed 17 MayDisplayed time zone: Hobart change
11:00 - 12:30 | Cognitive aspects of software developmentNIER - New Ideas and Emerging Results / Journal-First Papers / SEIS - Software Engineering in Society / SEIP - Software Engineering in Practice / SEET - Software Engineering Education and Training / Technical Track at Meeting Room 109 Chair(s): Nicole Novielli University of Bari | ||
11:00 15mTalk | Do I Belong? Modeling Sense of Virtual Community Among Linux Kernel Contributors Technical Track Bianca Trinkenreich Northern Arizona University, USA, Klaas-Jan Stol Lero; University College Cork; SINTEF Digital , Anita Sarma Oregon State University, Daniel M. German University of Victoria, Marco Gerosa Northern Arizona University, Igor Steinmacher Northern Arizona University Pre-print | ||
11:15 15mTalk | Cognitive Reflection in Software Verification and Testing SEET - Software Engineering Education and Training Kevin Buffardi California State University, Chico | ||
11:30 15mTalk | A Model for Understanding and Reducing Developer Burnout SEIP - Software Engineering in Practice Bianca Trinkenreich Northern Arizona University, USA, Klaas-Jan Stol Lero; University College Cork; SINTEF Digital , Igor Steinmacher Northern Arizona University, Marco Gerosa Northern Arizona University, Anita Sarma Oregon State University, Marcelo Lara Globant, Michael Feathers Globant, Nick Ross Globant, Kevin Bishop Globant Pre-print | ||
11:45 15mFull-paper | Designing for Cognitive Diversity: Improving the GitHub Experience for Newcomers SEIS - Software Engineering in Society Italo Santos Northern Arizona University, João Felipe Pimentel Northern Arizona University, Igor Wiese Federal University of Technology, Igor Steinmacher Northern Arizona University, Anita Sarma Oregon State University, Marco Gerosa Northern Arizona University Pre-print | ||
12:00 7mTalk | From Anecdote to Evidence: The Relationship Between Personality and Need for Cognition of Developers Journal-First Papers Daniel Russo Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University, Andres R. Masegosa Aalborg University, Klaas-Jan Stol Lero; University College Cork; SINTEF Digital Link to publication DOI Pre-print | ||
12:07 7mTalk | A Qualitative Study of Developers’ Discussions of Their Problems and Joys During the Early COVID-19 Months Journal-First Papers Gias Uddin University of Calgary, Canada, Omar Alam Trent University, Alexander Serebrenik Eindhoven University of Technology | ||
12:15 7mTalk | Interpersonal trust in OSS: Exploring dimensions of trust in GitHub pull requests NIER - New Ideas and Emerging Results Amirali Sajadi Drexel University, Kostadin Damevski Virginia Commonwealth University, Preetha Chatterjee Drexel University, USA Pre-print | ||
12:22 7mTalk | The risk-taking software engineer: A framed portrait NIER - New Ideas and Emerging Results Lorenz Graf-Vlachy University of Stuttgart Pre-print | ||