Preferências de áreas no contexto do desenvolvimento de software: um estudo exploratório.

Abstract

The choice of the preferred area or of actuation in the context of software development can be related to several factors. Recognizing and understanding how these factors affect these professionals is very important, so that people of different genders can work together in the best possible way. Therefore, the objective of this research is to identify what are the preferred areas among developers, if these areas can be related to a certain genre, and in the background, we want to study the gender bias in software development, analyzing whether the areas preferred among women are considered inferior or of lesser importance than the areas chosen by men. For this, a qualitative exploratory study was carried out through interviews with 10 Brazilian professionals (as) from software teams, from 6 different companies. It was identified that men's areas of preference are varied, but are directly related to development, while women's areas go beyond development and are more focused on software quality and the functional, for example. If the areas generally chosen as preferred or active by women are considered inferior, or less important, it was not possible to confirm with the data from this research, since the sample used was very small. With these results, it is possible to build hypotheses that can be analyzed in future studies.