Gender Differences in Planning Poker: A Preliminary Approach with Epistemic Network Analysis

Effort estimation in software engineering has been evolving from prescriptive, process-centered approaches to social, collaborative approaches under the umbrella of agile methods since the beginning of the 21th century. To foster the fair participation of all team members, collaboration dynamics such as planning poker have been adopted. Thus, encouraging such collaboration settings in the classroom is important in software engineering education. However, gender stereotypes and roles could hinder the equitable participation of women in such processes, affecting not only technical aspects of the process and product but also core agile principles such as team members’ motivation, team reflection capabilities, and process sustainability. In this study, we aim to illuminate the question of how women and men behave during a planning poker session in terms of key collaboration indicators. We examined the voice recordings of seven groups in planning poker role-playing teaching sessions; the interventions of each participant were coded in terms of the collaboration constructs: contribution, assimilation, self-regulating, team coordination, cultivation of environment, and integration. We applied Epistemic Network Analysis to study such indicators’ frequency and epistemic connections. The results show statistically significant differences in the epistemic networks of women and men. While their collaboration indicators seem similar, women tend to be less expressive and have fewer connections than men regarding self-regulation, assimilation, and integration. This could be explained by the asymmetric conformation of groups, which may hamper the psychological safety of women, and suggest the need for equitably composed teams in design activities.