Assignment 2 - Team Exploration - Diversity and Inclusion

Your 2nd assignment will build directly off of your 1st assignment.

By now, you should be well acquainted with the theme of the startups for this course, as well as your team. Your second assignment will be to identify areas where your team has expertise and where it may lack expertise.

The intention of this assignment is to help you identify strengths and weaknesses of your team, explore your own unconscious bias, and evaluate the general diversity of your team. You will be expected to identify some potential bias your team may have given their life experiences and describe how these biases may impact the project. You will further be expected to identify where you need to bring in subject matter experts and where you could improve your team’s diversity.

You will be expected to work together and submit this assignment as a team. Anyone can submit it, I suggest using an issue on the repo you’re about to create to coordinate that submission.

Example from a previous term

• Initial Requirements
• Diversity
• Submission
• Questions or Concerns
• Rubric

Initial Requirements

1. Should be at least 1 page of writing, 12pt font, single spaced. Write as much as you feel is needed to accurately capture the rest of these requirements.
2. Identify where your team’s backgrounds and expertise may benefit the project
3. Identify where your team’s backgrounds and expertise are not enough for this project
4. Given (3), identify some subject matter experts you think would help fill this gap. Describe how.
5. Identify where your team lacks diversity
6. Describe how the lack of diversity in certain areas could affect the company, such as cultural blindspots
7. Describe how people in other diverse groups benefit your team’s vision

Diversity

Your “startup” is global. The moment you launch, your project is global. It will target groups and demographics around the world, it will (hopefully) hire people who aren’t like you, it will grow as an collection of humans who are different. When your company lacks diversity, it stunts its own growth and contributes to toxicity in the industry.

Diversity is a very broad term and encompasses a lot of areas, both broad and niche. Some major areas of diversity include:

• Gender Identity
• Racial Identity
• Sexual Orientation
• Nationality
• People with Disabilities
• Immigrants
• Religous Identity

There are a lot more niche and broad topics that we could discuss, but this subset is just to get you started. The notion here is that people with different combinations of life experiences will help identify how your product may or may not work for them, provide novel ideas, and help with conflict resolution in the workplace as people are more accomodating by workplace culture of others’ differences, etc.

Keep in mind that we are not suggesting to selectively hire people based on their “diversity”, but to understand that diversity can help you grow and you can take proactive steps to ensure a welcoming environment for diverse candidates and customers.

Submission

You must create a release on your repo. This will give us a snapshot in time and allow us to grade it.

Assignments are always due at 11:59:59pm Eastern Time.

Second, you must submit the release on the LearnSoftware application. You can find the submission location here: https://learnsoftware.engineering/my_assignments

The release does not need to include pull requests or commits from every member. Please include the path location of the assignment within the release body.

Questions or Concerns?

• I don’t like part of this assignment
  • File an issue on this repo
• I need to clarify something about this assignment
  • File an issue on this repo
• I need to clarify a question or ask something in private
  • Email the course instructor or email the professor via the email on the homepage / README

Rubric

Rating Scale

This scale is used for each line of the rubric above.