Please note: This PhD seminar will take place in DC 2564 and online.
Nimmi Rashinika Weeraddana, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
Supervisor: Professor Shane McIntosh
Diversity has been recognized as a high-value team characteristic. Both open-source and proprietary software organizations have been investing heavily in creating more diverse teams. Prior work has raised diversity concerns about open-source communities; however, to the best of our knowledge, it is not yet clear if those diversity concerns permeate across all of the subteams of the project. Studying diversity in subteams would provide more detailed empirical evidence about the role of diversity in software development teams.
Therefore, we perform an empirical study on 110,336 developers who contributed to artifacts of 450 large and thriving open-source projects. We opt to study diversity of the DevOps team because it plays a central role in a project. In particular, we analyze the perceptible ethnic and gender diversity among DevOps contributors to open-source, and we ground our analysis in a comparison to non-DevOps contributors.
Overall, our results show that, with respect to perceptible ethnic diversity, contributors with perceptibly White names in a project are the majority of DevOps contributors (median = 87.70%) and non-DevOps contributors (median = 85.50%). With respect to gender diversity, contributors who are perceptible as men in a project are the majority of DevOps contributors (median = 93.75%) and non-DevOps contributors (median = 92.82%). We statistically measure the perceptible ethnic and gender diversity of both DevOps and non-DevOps contributors using diversity metrics, and we find that the diversity of DevOps contributors is significantly less than that of non-DevOps contributors. When analyzing the distribution of diversity change as projects evolve, we find that contributors perceptible as non-Whites (such as Hispanic and Black) are greatly underrepresented. Although the percentage of contributors perceptible as White is decreasing over time, the percentage of contributors perceptible as non-White is still low, i.e., it varies between 0%–16.02% for DevOps and 0%–18.77% for non-DevOps. We observe similar results for gender diversity, where contributors perceptible as men dominate over contributors perceptible as women.
Our study provides empirical evidence contributing towards a better understanding of diversity aspects from a different perspective (DevOps vs. non-DevOps contributors). Our findings call for higher awareness, not only of the overall diversity but also of the diversity in specific subteams of the project.
To attend this PhD seminar in person, please go to DC 2564. You can also attend virtually on Zoom.