Ten Years of Software Engineering in Society
Iffat Fatima, Patricia Lago
TL;DR
This paper presents a decade-long systematic mapping of ICSE SEIS track publications (2015–2024) to elucidate topics, trends, and gaps in software engineering in society, with a focus on sustainability evolution. It employs keyword clustering with BERT embeddings, a Wieringa research-type taxonomy, and primary/enabled sustainability mappings to analyze 123 SEIS papers. Findings show sustainability, diversity/inclusion, and open-source software as core themes, with a dominant social sustainability focus and minimal direct attention to environmental and economic dimensions; empirical studies and evaluation dominate, especially after 2022. The work highlights gaps in practical interventions, emotions in SE, and multidisciplinary approaches, and calls for broader replication and cross-venue analyses to guide future SEIS research and societal impact.
Abstract
In the international software engineering research community, the premier conference (ICSE) features since a decade a special track on the role of SE In Society (or SEIS track). In this work, we want to use the articles published in this track as a proxy or example of the research in this field, in terms of covered topics, trends, and gaps. Also, since SEIS was originally defined with a special focus on sustainability, we want to observe the evolution of the research in this respect. We conducted a mapping study of the 123 articles published in the SEIS track and among the results identified (i) trends pertaining sustainability, diversity and inclusion, and open-source software; (ii) gaps regarding concrete interventions to solve problems (e.g., workplace discrimination, the emotional well-being of developers); and (iii) a main sustainability focus in the social dimension, while the environmental dimension is the least frequently addressed. As future work, our aim is to stimulate discussion in the community and we hope to inspire replications of this work in other conference venues.