DSSC seminar - Prof. Alexander Serebrenik University of Eindhoven

Title: Gender and GitHub: what do we know about gender and software development and how we know it.

Abstract:

This talk will provide a brief overview of several recent studies of gender and gender diversity in software development teams. The main findings are: (1) more gender-diverse GitHub teams are not only more productive than less gender-diverse ones (Vasilescu et al., CHI 2015), but they are also less likely to exhibit suboptimal communication patterns (Catolino et al., ICSE-SEIS 2019) known to lead to suboptimal code patterns (Palomba et al., TSE 2019); and (2) social capital obtained by collaboration in GitHub open source projects is beneficial for duration of engagement in an open source project; diversity of information ties, i.e., involvement in very different projects, is beneficial for people of all genders, more so for women than for men (Qiu et al., ICSE 2019). Then we move to discussing what data science techniques have been used to obtain these results, their advantages and limitations.

Biography:

Alexander Serebrenik is a Full Professor of Social Software Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology. His research goal is to facilitate evolution of software by taking into account social aspects of software development. He has co-authored a book Evolving Software Systems (Springer Verlag, 2014) and more than 100 scientific papers and articles. He has won several distinguished paper and distinguished review awards.