Women’s entrepreneurship is a key driver of socio-economic empowerment in the Global South, yet patriarchal sociocultural contexts limit entrepreneur’s autonomy and, despite increasing attention to gender issues in HCI, shifting digital infrastructures cause privacy, security, and logistical challenges. We conduct 15 interviews with women entrepreneurs in Bangladesh who rely on digital technology, offering insight into who they are, their business and supply chains, technology use, and the gendered challenges of balancing work with family. We present women’s accounts of navigating in-person and online harassment and crime, including through payment platforms, and banking tools that legally enforce gender discrimination. We discuss how digital technology design must adapt to these pervasive issues and propose digital interventions to support developing their businesses and achieving financial independence. Our work contributes to understanding how HCI can take a transformative role in overcoming barriers and advancing mechanisms for women’s financial empowerment in the Global South.

The Software Engineering (SE) workforce is still man-dominated, and there are still fewer women students graduating from Computer Science/Software Engineering (CS/SE) courses in most countries. Two major reasons are fewer women enrolling in CS/SE courses and a lower percentage of those women who enrolled completing courses. We wanted to investigate the second reason - the experiences of students within the CS/SE education environment to identify key issues that need improvement to increase women student recruitment and completion. We interviewed 18 CS / SE students to explore their experiences. We requested they review selected SE education content to understand the perception of gender diversity within the SE education environment. Our findings indicate that many women students feel excluded by several behavioural aspects of their fellow men students, as well as by some teachers. We found that gender-biased language and stereotypical images make women students feel more excluded. From the experiences and opinions of our participants, we propose recommendations for higher education CS/SE teachers, universities and researchers to improve gender inclusion in SE teaching environments.

Abstract Disadvantaged communities often face compounded infrastructural, social, and economic barriers to accessing and utilizing information. This study investigates the information ecosystem of small‐scale fishing communities in climate‐vulnerable regions of Bangladesh, examining their information needs, access practices, and systemic constraints. Using a mixed‐methods design, we collected survey data from 520 fishing households across three districts, alongside 16 focus group discussions and 10 stakeholder interviews. Findings show that fishers primarily rely on informal networks and word‐of‐mouth, with limited use of digital tools due to affordability, low literacy, and weak infrastructure. Key information needs include fishing regulations, disaster alerts, market prices, and government assistance. However, fragmented communication channels, a lack of trust in public sources, and non‐transparent dissemination practices hinder effective access. Applying the Information Ecosystem Assessment (IEA) framework, the study identifies gaps across content delivery and governance processes. Rather than proposing a prescriptive solution, we outline an inclusive, community‐informed approach that emphasizes local influencers, improved communication practices, and trust‐building as entry points for intervention. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the information ecosystem in marginalized settings and offer practical insights for policymakers and development practitioners working to strengthen information equity and resilience in contexts marked by digital and infrastructural exclusion.

Women are underrepresented in Computer Science (CS)/ Software Engineering (SE) and other technology related degrees. As undergraduates, they are also less likely to persist with CS/SE studies than men enrolled in those same courses. Gender correlated differences in personal characteristics, behaviour, and preferences mean that course design decisions may introduce unintended bias. To address this issue, we drew inspiration from the GenderMag method. GenderMag uses personas with evidence-based gender differences in problem-solving traits to detect usability issues in software. In this paper we investigate the personal qualities of CS and SE students, and how these influence their CS/SE learning journey. A series of persona development workshops were held to gather an extensive and unique qualitative dataset capturing the prior experiences, preferences, learning styles, motivations, goals, frustrations, and constraints of CS/SE students. Gender differences were used to construct preliminary male and female student personas. These personas were used in cognitive walkthroughs of software applications commonly used in education, and their performance compared to GenderMag’s Tim and Abi. While the student personas were less effective and lacked specificity compared to Abi, they were able to identify issues not detectable with GenderMag. Furthermore, the findings show the utility of persona development workshops as a data collection method and introduce a comprehensive list of CS/SE student qualities that may inspire future investigations. • Identified differences in learning styles, motivations, goals, and frustrations. • Developed male and female CS/SE student persona. • Successful application of GenderMag with new personas on education software. • New personas could detect issues that existing GenderMag personas overlooked. • New CS/SE student persona can complement GenderMag persona.

Developing user-centred applications that address diverse user needs requires rigorous user research. This is time, effort and cost-consuming. With the recent rise of generative AI techniques based on Large Language Models (LLMs), there is a possibility that these powerful tools can be used to develop adaptive interfaces. This paper presents a novel approach to develop user personas and adaptive interface candidates for a specific domain using ChatGPT. We develop user personas and adaptive interfaces using both ChatGPT and a traditional manual process and compare these outcomes. To obtain data for the personas we collected data from 37 survey participants and 4 interviews in collaboration with a not-for-profit organisation. The comparison of ChatGPT generated content and manual content indicates promising results that encourage using LLMs in the adaptive interfaces design process.

Personas, a user characterisation, have been widely used in requirements engineering (RE) to enhance the understanding of end-users and their needs. However, the persona generation process is time-consuming and demands familiarity with a user-centered approach. The central issue lies in existing tools for automatically generating personas, which are restricted to generating persona templates and provide limited user control to tailor personas according to their specific needs. This paper introduces CRAFTER, a persona generation tool that uses Large Language Models (GPT-3.5 model). This tool not only automates persona creation but also offers recommendations to users for generating personas tailored to their requirements. The study involved an online questionnaire with 19 respondents who utilised the tool, providing feedback that indicated the tool’s sufficiency for persona generation while identifying areas for improvement. Beyond its primary function, CRAFTER stands out by providing guidance to requirements engineers throughout the persona creation process. The tool grants users the flexibility to customise personas based on their specific requirements, acknowledging the crucial human subjectivity in persona development. Additionally, CRAFTER promotes persona reusability, allowing users to save and reuse generated personas for future projects.

Personas, as a tool for characterising end-users, are widely utilised in requirements engineering (RE), primarily to enhance the understanding of end-users and their needs. However, the efficacy of persona usage in RE practice remains inadequately explored. To bridge this gap, we conducted an interview-based study with 22 international RE experts. These experts shared their experiences in utilising personas for RE-related tasks. Through thematic analysis of the collected insights, we propose recommendations for the effective creation and integration of personas in RE tasks. Our suggestions for efficient persona usage in RE emphasise the necessity of direct human interaction throughout persona development, while also con-sidering project constraints. We recommend creating personas that reflect the needs and preferences of persona consumers regarding the information included and the presentation style. Additionally, fostering organisational awareness of the benefits of personas in understanding targeted end-users is crucial. Lastly, we highlight the importance of the interpersonal skills required by requirements engineers to support the successful incorporation of personas in RE.

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic changed the way we live, work and the way we conduct research. With the restrictions of lockdowns and social distancing, various impacts were experienced by many software engineering researchers, especially whose studies depend on human participants. We conducted a mixed methods study to understand the extent of this impact. Through a detailed survey with 89 software engineering researchers working with human participants around the world and a further nine follow-up interviews, we identified the key challenges faced, the adaptations made, and the surprising fringe benefits of conducting research involving human participants during the pandemic. Our findings also revealed that in retrospect, many researchers did not wish to revert to the old ways of conducting human-orienfted research. Based on our analysis and insights, we share recommendations on how to conduct remote studies with human participants effectively in an increasingly hybrid world when face-to-face engagement is not possible or where remote participation is preferred.

The majority of Information Technology (IT)/Software Engineering (SE) professionals are male. A potential reason for the low number of female IT/SE professionals might be that the roles and the way they are advertised are biased towards male candidates. The aim of this research is to collect information about the present state of practice of gender inclusiveness within IT/SE job advertisements and how, if needed, we might improve this. We conducted a survey of hiring managers and IT/SE professionals (who are employed in IT/SE roles). The survey collected their general views on gender bias within job advertisements. According to their opinions, job advertisements are often biased towards male candidates. Based on the review and suggestions from our participants we developed a set of recommendations to help hiring managers design more gender inclusive SE job advertisements. This will be a first step toward developing a gender balanced SE workforce.

Children and elderly users typically interact very differently with the same software interfaces. These should be taken into consideration while designing and developing software that will be used by these users. In order to better understand the characteristics of children and elderly users of software, we systematically reviewed the relevant literature. We identified different facets of children and the elderly that are relevant to their interaction with the software. The facets for children are- Special needs children, Interaction with technology and General characteristics. Facets for elderly users are- Technical proficiency, Interaction with technology, Technology expectations and General characteristics. We developed a tool with different descriptions of those facets collected from our review. We collected feedback on the tool from experts and refined the tool accordingly. The personas generated using the tool can be used as is or can be extended by adding more context-specific information to the personas. The tool will help designers and developers of software interfaces to better understand the requirements of these user groups and to incorporate their specific needs during design and development. This will result in reducing biases arising from age-related facets and help to create more inclusive software.

Personas have been widely used during requirements engineering-related tasks. However, the presentation, composition, level of details and other characteristics varies greatly by domain of use. To better understand these, we formed a curated set of nearly 100 personas from 41 academic papers and analysed their similarities and differences. We then used our analysis to formulate a preliminary taxonomy of personas used for Requirements Engineering-related tasks. We describe our key findings from our analysis with examples, our preliminary taxonomy, and discuss ways the taxonomy can be used and further improved.

Extracting Queryable Knowledge Graphs from User Stories: An Empirical Evaluation

Software Engineering (SE) researchers need to interact with diverse communities such as disabled users, older adults, and people from various cultures and professions. This interactions have always been challenging that and were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic which led to the adoption of new methods such as Zoom-based interviews, collaborative tools-based workshops and so on. These issues can be overcome by collective knowledge sharing. This paper presents a knowledge sharing framework for the SE research community to support information sharing about research frameworks, tools, and guidelines to be used when interacting with particular participant groups. We developed this framework using JavaScript (JS) and CSS and hosted the knowledge data as YAML files in the GitHub repository. The framework facilitates adding new content to the tool while consuming what is already there. By using GitHub and establishing a CI/CD pipeline to Vercel (the hosting service) we supported automatic integration of content after it has been approved by a moderator. We developed this framework using the iterative development approach and sought feedback from the SE research community in each iteration.

Many work and living activities in modern society are increasingly dependent on web and app software. However, much existing software lacks consideration of many diverse end-user characteristics, such as age, mental and physical challenges, language proficiency, culture, socio-economic status, educational attainment and so on. Many developers do not have lived experience of most of these challenges, fail to empathise with those who have them, and lack knowledge of how to address them in their software design and evaluation activities. To address this issue, we designed a curated persona and design guidelines tool to help developers consider and address diverse end-user needs during the software development process. Our tool helps software development teams to take a more holistic view of human nature and diverse end-uses during the software development cycle and to design software with multiple diverse end-user needs in mind. Our evaluation with 23 real world software developers shows that the use of such human-centric persona and guideline tools in the early stages of software development can help to reduce software end-user bias and increase software accessibility.

Taking into account the diverse human aspects - gender, age, emotions, personality, language, culture, physical and mental challenges, etc - is critical towards achieving more human-centric design of software systems. Human-centric aspects affecting software have long been underestimated or even ignored as a result of the lack of in-depth capture and understanding during development. The use of technology has become the norm and the range of users has increased from just adults to children as well as seniors. Modelling frameworks are methods to represent the way a software system should be defined, and to date, little research has been done on age-related issues within modelling frameworks. In this paper, we investigate how human-centric aspects regarding age can be better modelled by extending these modelling frameworks. We introduce an extension to wireframe-based designs so that they can cater for decisions regarding age within the modelling framework. We have evaluated this modelling extension using multiple questionnaires as well as usability testing by using the extended age-modelling wireframe approach to design a news app. Questionnaires were used to evaluate the requirements of the users and developers for the extended wireframes. Our analysis shows that when using our extended wireframes, developers can cater for different user types and their accessibility needs easily and therefore users can use the prototypes with more ease.

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted almost every sphere of life. Higher education in Australia was similarly majorly impacted, and due to the sudden necessity of ensuring physical distancing, on campus teaching became impossible. Most of the higher educational institutes in Australia moved to using a distance education mode to continue delivery of teaching with barely a few weeks warning. This article presents experiences moving a data structures and networking course taught to Software Engineering students at an Australian university during COVID-19 pandemic to online delivery. Due to the nature of the course and student cohort, a number of challenges were faced teaching the course in online mode compared to that for which it was designed. We summarize key lessons learned and propose some guidelines for future course design to take advantage of online learning while maintaining learning outcomes.

The broad domain of software testing includes different job responsibilities such as creating test plans, devising and running a variety of tests, documenting results, to liaising between different development teams. In this paper, we attempt to collate a list of software testing job responsibilities by applying three different social research methodologies to collect information from different sources. We found that “test” specific responsibilities are divided into several unit tasks including test suite generation, execution of test plans, and so on. We also found that along with test specific responsibilities, software testers must perform a number of other tasks common to other IT professionals in order to carry out their roles.

The effectiveness of testing is a major determinant of software quality. It is believed that individual testers vary in their effectiveness, but so far the factors contributing to this variation have not been well studied. In this study, we examined whether personality traits, as described by the five-factor model, affect performance on a software testing task. ICT students were given a small software testing task at which their effectiveness was assessed using several different criteria, including bug location rate, weighted fault density, and bug report quality. Their personality was assessed using the NEO PI-3 personality questionnaire. We then compared testing performance according to individual and aggregate measures against different five-factor personality traits. Several weak correlations between two of these personality traits, extraversion and conscientiousness, and testing effectiveness were found.

With the growth of the software testing industry, many in-house testing groups and outsourcing testing companies have been established. Underlying the success of these testing groups and companies are team(s) of testers. This research investigates the importance of different factors, diversity and experience on building a successful testing team. We collected the opinions of testing practitioners on these factors via a survey. The outcome strongly indicates the relative importance of different factors and that diversity is helpful for a testing team. The results also support the importance of suitable team experience.