Effective Inclusion of People with Disabilities in Software Development Teams
Thayssa A. da Rocha, Cleidson R. B. de Souza, Luciano Arruda Teran, Marcelle Pereira Mota · 2024
Context: People with Disabilities (PWD) have seen the software development market as an alternative for overcoming some of the inclusion barriers they face in society. A career in software development presents itself as an opportunity for dignified and equal employment conditions. However, there is limited software engineering research about the PWD’s effective inclusion in software development teams. Objectives and Methods: This paper presents the emerging results from a systematic literature review on three Computer Science databases over the last decade (2013-2023). Our objective is to identify relevant technical and human aspects of PWD’s effective inclusion in software development teams. Results: From 1,006 initial papers, 572 were analyzed, and 39 were selected because they discuss PWD as members of software development teams. We examined them with quantitative and qualitative approaches. Our results indicate that including PWD as members of software development teams is a topic underexplored in software engineering research, with 11 papers out of the 39 discussing this topic. In addition, visual impairment is the most addressed disability, while programming is the most common role played by these professionals in software development teams. PWD’s challenges are usually technical and social, such as the accessibility of tools and mixed-ability teams’ work dynamics. We conclude by presenting the PWD’s workarounds to deal with these challenges, which are common and essential to guarantee minimally equal participation. Conclusion: Our contribution is to outline the research trajectory about including PWD as software developers over the past decade and steer new efforts towards their effective integration into software development teams.