Ten Years of Software Engineering in Society

TL;DR

This study analyzes a decade of research articles from the ICSE SEIS track to identify trends, gaps, and focus areas in software engineering's societal impact, emphasizing sustainability and diversity.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive mapping of research topics, trends, and gaps in SE in society, highlighting sustainability's social and environmental dimensions.

Findings

Focus on social sustainability and diversity issues.

Gaps in interventions for workplace discrimination and developer well-being.

Environmental sustainability is less addressed than social aspects.

Abstract

In the international software engineering research community, the premier conference (ICSE) features since a decade a special track on the role of SE In Society (or SEIS track). In this work, we want to use the articles published in this track as a proxy or example of the research in this field, in terms of covered topics, trends, and gaps. Also, since SEIS was originally defined with a special focus on sustainability, we want to observe the evolution of the research in this respect. We conducted a mapping study of the 123 articles published in the SEIS track and among the results identified (i) trends pertaining sustainability, diversity and inclusion, and open-source software; (ii) gaps regarding concrete interventions to solve problems (e.g., workplace discrimination, the emotional well-being of developers); and (iii) a main sustainability focus in the social dimension, while the environmental dimension is the least frequently addressed. As future work, our aim is to stimulate discussion in the community and we hope to inspire replications of this work in other conference venues.