In this post, App Dev Manager Ketuan Baldwin explains the importance of Diversity Driven Development(DDD) and its impact in the technology industry.

Diversity Driven Development (DDD) is concept that I’ve envisioned for some time. DDD can enable you, your team and/or your organization to build software and services that provide solution beyond just the current customer demographic. Think of DDD as a deep mix between Inclusive Design and Behavior Driven Development.

With Inclusive Design, we learn from and include people with a broad range of perspective to be apart of the design process. This methodology and thinking opens the door for products and service to be offer to new people and enable them to achieve more.

The ideas around inclusive design work well with software development best practices like Behavior Driven Development (BDD). BBD is about shared responsibility between business team and engineering team with the customer as the focus point in the collaboration efforts. In addition, the roots of BDD comes from Test Driven Development (TDD) which is focused on building test first and embedding automated test to build quality software.

The idea of Diversity Driven Development has unofficially become critical in some of the big bets the Microsoft has made especially when it comes to AI. The Microsoft AI principles can’t be achieved without having a mindset toward DDD. These principles include Fairness, Inclusiveness, Reliability & Safety, Privacy & Security and Accountability.

Diversity Driven Development will help software engineers around the world to think about scenarios such as…

• The Single Mother in Boston whose hands are always tied up and only has her voice to navigate software via the Web.
• The Teenage Gamer in Houston born without hands but would love to play video games with his friends.
• The Senior Citizens in Miami who need to reorder medication but has trouble navigating the vendors website and telephone options.
• The Entrepreneur in Cuba that want to scale is his service business but has limited access to the internet.

Share your thoughts on if you think the idea of DDD can enable you to achieve more in developing software and services.

As always, Stay #winning my Friends…