Fostering Psychological Safety for Interpersonal Learning in Neurodiverse Software Teams
Published in Conference for Research on Equitable and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology (RESPECT), 2025
Recommended citation: Darren Butler. 2025. Fostering Psychological Safety for Interpersonal Learning in Neurodiverse Software Teams. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference for Research on Equitable and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology (RESPECT 2025), July 14–16, 2025, Newark, NJ, USA . ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3704637.3734749 http://darrendbutler.github.io/files/RESPECT_Doctoral_Consortium_Research_Summary.pdf
Abstract: In software engineering, psychological safety is the shared belief that team members feel safe to take interpersonal risks in the workplace. Psychological safety plays an essential role in communication, especially in tightly coupled team activities like mob programming (i.e., mobbing), in which three or more team members develop software together. Mobbing requires members to play different roles while suggesting and digesting new ideas, which makes them particularly vulnerable to interpersonal risk. Autistic software engineers can struggle with mob programming, as they experience high levels of anxiety and stress when communicating with others due to their different cognitive and communication styles \cite{cageBurntOutDropping2022}. A collaborative space that allows autistic team members to flexibly communicate in neurodiverse teams can increase the psychological safety and accessibility of collaborative software development.
To identify tools and practices that foster psychological safety in neurodiverse collaborative mob programming, I will conduct a series of mixed-method, design-based studies. First, I conduct a survey and interview study to uncover the relationship between neurodivergent cognitive and communication traits and psychological safety in teams. Second, I generate design principles for psychological safety through the iterative design and evaluation of a neuroinclusive digital collaboration space. Third, I evaluate the impact of these design principles through an experiment with majority, minority and all neurodivergent teams.
My work makes the following contributions to accessible software engineering education and practice: 1) Novel descriptions of psychological safety relating to neurodivergent cognitive and communication attributes; 2) design principles for fostering psychological safety in collaborative software development teams; 3) a software development tool that scaffolds psychologically safe mobbing in neurodiverse software teams.