Abstract: How can software industry professionals (e.g., developers, UI/UX professionals, product managers) assess whether their software supports a wide socioeconomic range of users as possible? And if they find issues preventing that, how can they fix them? We present the emerging SocioeconomicMag, a systematic software process for finding and fixing “socioeconomic inclusivity bugs" — features and workflows developers unwittingly insert into software that erect barriers against individuals with certain socioeconomic statuses. Our early results are very promising. It turns out that SocioeconomicMag is useful in ways beyond software design. In the second part of this talk, we talk about other benefits it can bring to software engineers, to HCI/UX professionals, and to CS Education itself. Note: SocioeconomicMag is just emerging, and we are actively looking for field collaborators to try it out in the field.
Bio: Margaret Burnett is a Distinguished Professor at Oregon State University. She co-leads the team that created GenderMag, a software inspection process that uncovers gender inclusiveness issues in software from spreadsheets to programming environments. Her newest projects related to GenderMag include the InclusiveMag meta-method, SocioeconomicMag, and a new analytical approach to intersectionally inclusive software. Burnett is an ACM Fellow, a member of the ACM CHI Academy, and an award-winning mentor. She has served in over 50 conference organization and program committee roles. She was recently honored with the 2022 IEEE CS TCSE Distinguished Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) Leadership Award and the 2023 AnitaB Grace Hopper Conference's ABIE Tech Leader Award.
Host: Prof. Laura Dillon
Department of Computer Science and Engineering