A Conceptual Model for Gender-Inclusive Requirements

• Autor(a) principal: Nunes, Inês Raquel de Almeida Lopes
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/145198
• topic: gender issues; gender-inclusion; requirements engineering; software engineering; software development; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Engenharia Eletrotécnica, Eletrónica e Informática

Gender equality is a fundamental human right. Empowering all women and girls means empowering half of the world’s population, and therefore it is essential to create a peaceful and sustainable future. However, there is still a great deal to be done to achieve full equality of rights and opportunities for everyone. Gender inequality persists and prevents the development and thriving of individuals and societies. Such is the case of girls’ and women’s under-representation in information, communication, and technology, where only 3% of the graduates worldwide are women. Consequently, technology development holds serious problems of inclusion and diversity. As technologies rapidly evolve and revolutionize the way we live, missing diverse perspectives during development produces a gender-biased technology that, instead of advancing gender equality, creates new barriers in achieving it. Technology can play a fundamental role in progressing gender equality and ensuring gender inclusion. Although considered neutral, the software does not equally serve everyone who depends on it. Software systems favor characteristics that are statistically more observed in majorities, ignoring or even attacking certain minorities. Concerning gender, existing systems favor characteristics that are statistically more observed in men over characteristics observed in other genders (e.g., trans, cis women, non-binary). The goal of this dissertation is to create awareness that the problem of non-inclusive software is real and investigate how to develop software that benefits everyone, regardless of their gender. As a first step, we performed a systematic mapping study to gather a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art on gender issues in software engineering. This study served as the groundwork for the development of a conceptual model for gender-inclusive requirements. The model aims to support requirements engineers by providing a representation of gender domain knowledge that can be used as a resource for eliciting gender-inclusive requirements. To integrate the conceptual model into the existing practices of requirements engineers, we propose a framework that offers a set of guidelines with concrete goals to ensure a focus on gender inclusion from the earliest phases and throughout the development process. We applied the framework to develop a gender-inclusive prototype tool that supports the process of using the framework. The developed model was empirically evaluated by a group of 31 participants and the results were positive. The conceptual model was published in a CORE A conference