How to Debug Inclusivity Bugs? A Debugging Process with Information Architecture

TL;DR

This paper introduces Why/Where/Fix, a systematic process leveraging Information Architecture to identify, localize, and fix inclusivity bugs in software, significantly reducing such bugs in open source projects.

Contribution

It presents a novel debugging process that systematically addresses inclusivity bugs through IA-based fault localization, filling a gap in existing research.

Findings

Reduced inclusivity bugs experienced by OSS newcomers by 90%.

Demonstrated effectiveness of IA-based fault localization in debugging.

Validated process through multi-stage qualitative empirical evaluation.

Abstract

Although some previous research has found ways to find inclusivity bugs (biases in software that introduce inequities), little attention has been paid to how to go about fixing such bugs. Without a process to move from finding to fixing, acting upon such findings is an ad-hoc activity, at the mercy of the skills of each individual developer. To address this gap, we created Why/Where/Fix, a systematic inclusivity debugging process whose inclusivity fault localization harnesses Information Architecture(IA) -- the way user-facing information is organized, structured and labeled. We then conducted a multi-stage qualitative empirical evaluation of the effectiveness of Why/Where/Fix, using an Open Source Software (OSS) project's infrastructure as our setting. In our study, the OSS project team used the Why/Where/Fix process to find inclusivity bugs, localize the IA faults behind them, and then fix the IA to remove the inclusivity bugs they had found. Our results showed that using Why/Where/Fix reduced the number of inclusivity bugs that OSS newcomer participants experienced by 90%.