Ethical software engineering is a big issue when it comes to creating applications that is used among any amounts of users. The idea of ethics comes from moral judgments. One way of looking at ethics is to view how one person affects the world. In the case of software engineering, we have to verify if the code that someone creates makes stakeholders’ lives better. A stakeholder is someone who is affected by the actions of the software engineer. As software engineers, we have to positively affect the stakeholders around us. We should make sure that whatever we are coding is the best that these stakeholders can get.
For me, ethics in terms of software engineering is making sure that we help people instead of cause harm to them. We need to always be progressing to be better at coding while still being able to take into consideration what will make users happy, as well as taking into consideration the effects that our programs will have on our users. Software engineers should not just pump out code for whatever person pays the most. To make ethical decisions, software engineers need to take into consideration how the program that they create will affect all stakeholders.
In one case study, a man named Bill worked on a project for a pharmaceutical company that wanted him to create a quiz to determine what medicine a person needed. The quiz would ask women for many things, but no matter what answers were selected, only one drug was shown as what the women needed, unless they were either taking the drug or allergic to ingredients in the drug. Later on, Bill found out that a girl who was taking the medication had committed suicide. The prescription drug’s main side effects were severe depression and suicidal thoughts. His sister was even prescribed the same drug, although he stopped her from taking it. Bill’s decision to create the quiz impacted many people because he created a program that made people take a drug with severe negative ipacts. He resigned shortly after finding out about the drug’s effects.
This case study is a great example of how someone’s code can affect users in a negative way. Bill was essentially a robot who only moved on to the next job and didn’t think about the consequences of creating the quiz. He did not act ethically because the drug that he was creating had chances of causing harm to people. His conscience got to him after something happened, but if he had the right mindset as an ethical coder, he would not have taken the offer. If he was forced into coding the quiz, he should have tried to refuse, and if not, he should have resigned immediately to be an ethical coder. Thankfully, Bill has learned from his mistake, although regretfully.
Once again, as coders, we need to make sure that what we are creating follows a sense of morality. Are we helping others? What are the effects of what we do? We need to strive to be the best we can be while helping others as much as possible. We need to think about how we can make the world a better place.