Beyond Diversity:Computing for Inclusive Software

TL;DR

This paper discusses the importance of inclusive software development, analyzing practices that foster inclusivity and highlighting the role of empathy and motivation in creating software accessible to diverse end users.

Contribution

It introduces insights from the Inspire program on inclusive software practices, emphasizing empathy-based requirements gathering and team motivation as key factors.

Findings

Empathy-based requirements gathering improves inclusivity.

Team motivation influences inclusive software development.

Analysis of Inspire program's development practices.

Abstract

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.