Understanding what drives software development productivity is the key to making high-impact investments in engineering productivity. For instance, research shows that high quality engineering managers, good documentation, and teams’ ability to resolve conflicts quickly are all associated with engineers’ productivity.

But not every engineer experiences these productivity factors in similar ways, especially engineers from historically marginalized groups.

In this talk, Dr. Emerson Murphy-Hill discusses what recent research on engineering productivity tells us about the surprising inequities in software engineering and what we can do about them, including:

• What works for building and sustaining highly diverse engineering teams.
• How putting authors’ faces at the top of technical documentation activates ageism in readers.
• How women experience more interpersonal conflict during code review than men, and how implementing anonymous code review in your team can help.