Generative AI (genAI) tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Copilot) have become ubiquitous in software engineering (SE). As SE educators, it behooves us to understand the consequences of genAI usage among SE students and to create a holistic view of where these tools can be successfully used. Through 16 reflective interviews with SE students, we explored their academic experiences of using genAI tools to complement SE learning and implementations. We uncover the contexts where these tools are helpful and where they pose challenges, along with examining why these challenges arise and how they impact students. We validated our findings through member checking and triangulation with instructors. Our findings provide practical considerations of where and why genAI should (not) be used in the context of supporting SE students.

Online computer science (CS) courses have broadened access to CS education, yet inclusivity barriers persist for minoritized groups in these courses. One problem that recent research has shown is that often inclusivity biases (“inclusivity bugs”) lurk within the course materials themselves, disproportionately disadvantaging minoritized students. To address this issue, we investigated how a faculty member can use AID—an Automated Inclusivity Detector tool—to remove such inclusivity bugs from a large online CS1 (Intro CS) course and what is the impact of the resulting inclusivity fixes on the students’ experiences. To enable this evaluation, we first needed to (Bugs): investigate inclusivity challenges students face in 5 online CS courses; (Build): build decision rules to capture these challenges in courseware (“inclusivity bugs”) and implement them in the AID tool; (Faculty): investigate how the faculty member followed up on the inclusivity bugs that AID reported; and (Students): investigate how the faculty member’s changes impacted students’ experiences via a before-vs-after qualitative study with CS students. Our results from (Bugs) revealed 39 inclusivity challenges spanning courseware components from the syllabus to assignments. After implementing the rules in the tool (Build), our results from (Faculty) revealed how the faculty member treated AID more as a “peer” than an authority in deciding whether and how to fix the bugs. Finally, the study results with (Students) revealed that students found the after-fix courseware more approachable - feeling less overwhelmed and more in control in contrast to the before-fix version where they constantly felt overwhelmed, often seeking external assistance to understand course content.

Computer science (CS) and information technology (IT) curricula are grounded in theoretical and technical skills. Topics like equity and inclusive design are rarely found in mainstream student studies. This results in graduates with outdated practices and limitations in software development. A research project was conducted to educate the faculty to integrate inclusive software design into the CS undergraduate curriculum. The objective is to produce graduates with the ability to develop inclusive software.

What if “regular” Computer Science (CS) faculty each taught elements of inclusive design in “regular” CS courses across an undergraduate curriculum? Would it affect the CS program's climate and inclusiveness to diverse students? Would it improve retention? Would students learn less CS? Would they actually learn any inclusive design? To answer these questions, we conducted a year-long Action Research investigation, in which 13 CS faculty integrated elements of inclusive design into 44 CS/IT offerings across a 4-year curriculum. The 613 affected students’ educational work products, grades, and/or climate questionnaire responses revealed significant improvements in students’ course outcomes (higher course grades and fewer course fails/incompletes/withdrawals), especially for marginalized groups; revealed that most students did learn and apply inclusive design concepts to their CS activities; and revealed that inclusion and teamwork in the courses significantly improved. These results suggest a new pathway for significantly improving students’ retention, their knowledge and usage of inclusive design, and their experiences across CS education—for marginalized groups and for all students.

Motivation: Although asynchronous online CS courses have enabled more diverse populations to access CS higher education, research shows that online CS-ed is far from inclusive, with women and other underrepresented groups continuing to face inclusion gaps. Worse, diversity/inclusion research in CS-ed has largely overlooked the online courseware—the web pages and course materials that populate the online learning platforms—that constitute asynchronous online CS-ed’s only mechanism of course delivery.

Mentoring is traditionally viewed as a dyadic, top-down apprenticeship. This perspective, however, overlooks other forms of informal mentoring taking place in everyday activities in which developers invest time and effort. Here, we investigate informal mentoring taking place in Open Source Software (OSS). We define a specific type of informal mentoring—implicit mentoring—situations where contributors guide others through instructions and suggestions embedded in everyday (OSS) activities. We defined implicit mentoring by first performing a review of related work on mentoring, and then through formative interviews with OSS contributors and member-checking. Next, through an empirical investigation of Pull Requests (PRs) in 37 Apache Projects, we built a classifier to extract implicit mentoring. Our analysis of 107,895 PRs shows that implicit mentoring does occur through code reviews (27.41% of all PRs included implicit mentoring) and is beneficial for both mentors and mentees. We analyzed the impact of implicit mentoring on OSS contributors by investigating their contributions and learning trajectories in their projects. Through an online survey (N=231), we then triangulated these results and identified the potential benefits of implicit mentoring from OSS contributors’ perspectives.

The tools and infrastructure used in tech, including Open Source Software (OSS), can embed "inclusivity bugs"- features that disproportionately disadvantage particular groups of contributors. To see whether OSS developers have existing practices to ward off such bugs, we surveyed 266 OSS developers. Our results show that a majority (77%) of developers do not use any inclusivity practices, and 92% of respondents cited a lack of concrete resources to enable them to do so. To help fill this gap, this paper introduces AID, a tool that automates the GenderMag method to systematically find gender-inclusivity bugs in software. We then present the results of the tool's evaluation on 20 GitHub projects. The tool achieved precision of 0.69, recall of 0.92, an F-measure of 0.79 and even captured some inclusivity bugs that human GenderMag teams missed.

Open source communities hosted in large foundations operate in a complex socio-technical ecosystem, which includes a heterogeneous mix of projects and stakeholders. Previous work has thus far investigated the challenges faced in OSS communities from the point of view of specific stakeholders, primarily at the level of individual projects. None have yet studied the challenges faced within a large, federated open source organization. In this paper, we aim to bridge this gap to identify ongoing challenges contributors face in a mature OSS organization. To do so, we surveyed 624 contributors at the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and ran 11 semi-structured follow up interviews. We validated our findings through member checking with the interviewees as well as the ASF Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) committee. The contributions of this paper include: (1) an empirically-evidenced conceptual model of the 88 challenges that contributors face in a mature OSS foundation and (2) a set of 48 community-recommended strategies for alleviating these challenges. Our results show that even well-established and mature organizations still face a variety of individual and project-specific challenges and that it is difficult to design a comprehensive set of processes and guidelines to match the needs and expectations of a diverse and large federated community. Our conceptual challenges model and associated strategies to mitigate them can provide guidance to other OSS foundations and projects helping them in building better support processes and tools to create a successful, thriving community of contributors.