Decoding Diversity: Understanding its Impact on Team Performance in Software Teams

As software becomes more ubiquitous in society, software engineering (SE) teams are tasked with designing technologies for more diverse users, requiring more innovation. As SE teams become more diverse due to industrial diversity initiatives to boost innovation, teams struggle with the challenges of diversity, such as heightened conflict. SE lacks an understanding of the relationship between diversity and high team performance. This research leverages work outside SE to build a theory explaining the diversity-performance relationship for SE teams. Preliminary results suggest several factors which support high performance in diverse teams: the ability to develop practical skills, overcome hardships, and manage emotions, and emphasize the important role of empathy in SE teams.