Tutorial: Using the Software Engineering Code of Ethics in Professional Computing Issues Don Gotterbarn East Tennessee State University
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Keith Miller Illinois State University Springfield
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Software Engineering Professionals face ethical conflicts. A true professional faces these challenges intelligently and analytically. Professional practice consists of both technical knowledge and the application of that skill guided by ethical standards. The Software Engineering Code of Ethics and Professional Practice provides guidance for a computer professional who must reason through tradeoffs between stakeholder interests, ethical principals, and legal and economic factors. Academic accrediting agencies (for example, ABET) encourage universities to help their students better understand professional ethics. Future computer professionals who are prepared for ethical challenges are more likely to handle them prudently. A quality academic curriculum for computing professionals should include some aspects of professional ethics in each of its courses (even theoretical courses), as well as a special course that focuses primarily on ethics. In both these approaches (integrated in all courses and presented in a dedicated course), the use of “case studies” is a powerful way to teach and learn about computer ethics. The Software Engineering Code of Ethics and Professional Practice (“the Code”) is a useful tool in guiding faculty and students in their analysis of case studies. In a half-day tutorial, we will present well developed examples and modules which can be used to engage students and computing professionals. We will introduce some examples of realistic, ethically-charged decisions that computing professionals face, and then we will explore how the Code is useful in making wise and creative decisions. We will illustrate the ethical impacts of choice of software process model, architecture, and design patterns using real world examples including examples from Grady Booch. We will practice some of the ethics training techniques that have successfully been used by some corporations in the computer-related industries. We will also describe how to make useful ethics training tools relevant and accessible to software engineers. . Participants will be given complete “turnkey” training examples and they will understand how to develop new examples and course materials for use in industry and academe. Presenters: Donald Gotterbarn and Keith Miller were on the executive committee that produced the Software Engineering Code of Ethics and have conducted numerous workshops for computer ethics educators. They have also authored articles on software engineering professional ethics issues. Both have been recognized for their work in computer ethics by SIGCAS of the ACM and by the IEEE Computer Society. Keith is the editor-in-chief of IEEE’s Technology and Society Magazine.
