2022/02/27 by Mariam Guizani, Igor Steinmacher, Jillian Emard +3
Computer Science · #Computer science #Computer security #Debugging #Empirical research #Fault (geology) #Internet privacy #Open source #Open source software #Process (computing) #Programming language #Software #Software Engineering Research #Software Engineering Techniques and Practices #Software System Performance and Reliability #Software bug #Software engineering #World Wide Web #cs.CY #cs.HC #cs.SE
paper · pdf · doi:10.1145/3510458.3513009
12 pages, Accepted at ICSE SEIS 2022
arxiv created 2022/02/27 · arxiv updated 2022/03/01 · openalex created_date 2022/04/03 · openalex publication_date 2022/05/21 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
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%.