Pankaj Kamthan
ABSTRACT
The increasingly anthropomorphic, at times even autocratic, nature of software, exhibited during routine activities such as decision-making, question-answering, or recommending, has only contributed to the enduring issue of software ethics. This paper, after providing an understanding of the unique nature of software and that of ethicality, models ethicality as a meta-quality attribute and proposes an ethically-sensitive, standards-based, technology-and-tool-independent, applicable to software-as-a-product-or-service, semi-formal framework, comprising interrelated conceptual meta-models that provide an understanding of ethicality, user story environment, and user story process. It describes an approach of integrating ethicality naturally and systematically in the user story process, illustrates this approach by means of representative examples from a variety of application domains, and highlights the associated challenges in doing so. It also presents the results of a preliminary survey of students and professionals on their knowledge and experience of ethics in (agile) software projects. Finally, it outlines directions of research, and provides recommendations for those in academia and industry, which have broad implications for ethically-sensitive (agile) requirements engineering education and (agile) software testing.
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