PROFESSIONAL AND ETHICAL DILEMMAS IN SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

by Jean Sanchez 9/14/2011

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PROFESSIONAL AND ETHICAL DILEMMAS

Introduction Software engineers often

engage in unprofessional or unethical behaviors.

Ethical dilemmas occur in SE when professional must make a choice between competing values and professional values.

Motivation: Trying to categorize dilemmas in order to increase awareness and decrease the frequency with which these dilemmas occur.

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Categorizing Dilemmas Mission Impossible Mea Culpa Rush Job Not my problem Non-diligence Fictionware/Vaporware Canceled Vacation Sweep it under the Rug

PROFESSIONAL AND ETHICAL DILEMMAS

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MISSION IMPOSSIBLE

Occurs when an individual is asked to create or accept a schedule that is obviously impossible to meet.

Consequences range from loss of qualified staff to significant loss of revenue.

Other consequences involve losses from customers stop buying product due to speculations.

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MEA CULPA

Translated to English as “my mistake” or “my fault”

Occurs when staff members must deliver a product that still lacks key functionalities or has known defects.

Consequences include customer dissatisfaction in the short term, bad reputation and lost of market share or sales in the long term.

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RUSH JOB

A developer working on a software product delivers working code, but the quality of the product is inferior.

Reasons involve poor work ethic or perceived pressure to deliver.

VS Mea Culpa: In mea culpa product is delivered with lack of functionalities. Rush Job the product is complete but the overall quality of the code is questionable.

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NOT MY PROBLEM

Accepting status quo leaving no inclination to improvement.

Called this way because team members frequently will state that quality, productivity, and best-practice issues are someone else’s responsibility.

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RED LIES Occur when representatives make statements

about a product or project that are not true.

Stating that a project is on schedule when the team already knows they cannot deliver it on time.

NONDILIGENCE Both involve promises to deliver a system for

which some agreed-on features are infeasible.

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Both involve promises to deliver a system for which some agreed-on features are infeasible.

In fictionware, product exists but lacks a variable amount of the specified functionalities.

On the other hand, in vaporware the product and its functionalities does not exist.

FICTIONWARE/VAPORWARE

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This problem arises when managers pressure staff members at the last minute to cancel personal time to meet short-term goals.

The consequences of these practices can be very harmful for an organization in the short and long term creating unfriendly working environments and lost of valuable employees.

CANCELED VACATION

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Occurs when unforeseen issues arise that could potentially damage a project but, to keep things “running smoothly”, developers ignore the issue hoping it to vanish.

SWEEP IT UNDER THE RUG

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CHALLENGES ACM and IEEE Ethics Codes

There is a code of ethics which might help to reduce the dilemmas in which software developers are sometimes involved.

However these code have not served the professional software community as well as they might for a variety of reasons: Many software pros do not belong to IEEE or ACM Many individuals working in on projects might not be

software pros, but instead product or project managers.

Many ACM and IEEE members are unfamiliar with these ethics code.

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CONCLUSION

Purpose: categorizing dilemmas in order to increase awareness and decrease the frequency with which these dilemmas occur.

Ethical codes apply to everyday practice. Ethical dilemmas can cascade, with and

increment probability of failure with each misstep.

A possible way to prevent these behaviors is professional or corporate education.