Abstract
Software systems are increasingly being employed in people’s lives and society. They can improve, but also negatively affect the quality of life and interfere with human rights by, e.g., undermining the individuals’ and society’s values and causing ethical issues. To prevent such issues, software architects need to take ethical considerations into account at the early stages of design, e.g., when making architecture design decisions. Such considerations regard stakeholders, ethical values and their relations, ethical concerns, and ethical decisions. Addressing ethical considerations is especially difficult for software architects because of (i) the lack of training in ethics and philosophy, (ii) the existence of inherent ambiguity in ethical values, and (iii) the lack of methodological support in dealing with ethical and social implications of software systems, and eliciting and operationalizing ethical values. This study employs a design science methodology for developing a card-based game (called Ethics-Aware DecidArch), helping software architects reflect on ethical considerations, and creating an atmosphere to foster inclusivity by supporting the values of different stakeholders when making group decisions. The game was played in four sessions, each including four professional software architects from two multinational IT companies. This study presents lessons learned from playing the game through a participant survey and qualitative data analysis. The results show that the game helped software architects (i) reflect on different solutions for resolving ethical concerns, (ii) make ethical decisions along with providing reasons behind such decisions, and (iii) reflect on the operationalization of ethical values and their trade-offs.
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Notes
- 1.
It includes changing both cards and playing rules of the DecidArch game wrt ethical concerns, e.g., adding Wild Cards and carrying out the game as role-play.
- 2.
Under the supervision of researchers, the game was played, recorded, and evaluated as a basis for the analysis.
- 3.
- 4.
Most players have worked in more than one IT sector.
- 5.
We used ATLAS.ti as a tool to analyze the sessions’ transcripts.
- 6.
It is determined based on the importance of ethical values from the perspective of different stakeholders in the context of the case.
- 7.
After the determination of their roles, they should read ‘Ethical Value Cards’ to be guided to have their own ethical value(s) wrt their role’s perspective (although this is optional). It is worth noting that the player responsible for the role of indirect stakeholders has two choices, i.e., society X or Noora’s parents.
- 8.
This template is for each player to record their decisions and reasoning behind decisions.
- 9.
This template is to record the group decisions, the reasoning behind decisions, and the effects of the decisions on the relevant values.
- 10.
In the following, [Si-Pj] indicates the player Pj of the session Si.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to acknowledge our gratitude to the S2 group at VU and BE cluster members at TU/e, and the software architects from two multinational IT companies who have helped develop the game and provided valuable feedback. Also, we thank Antony Tang for his feedback on earlier versions of this work.
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Alidoosti, R., Lago, P., Poort, E., Razavian, M. (2023). Designing Ethics-Aware DecidArch Game to Promote Value Diversity in Software Architecture Design Decision Making. In: Antona, M., Stephanidis, C. (eds) Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction. HCII 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14020. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35681-0_1
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