Ethics software engineering

We shall also discuss the obligations and privileges which membership of a profession carries and the way in which individuals qualify for membership in particular, we shall consider some of the ethical issues that arise in software engineering and the ways in which these may be addressed. 

Confusingly, the lEEE-CS/ACM code is entitled Software engineering code of ethics and professional practice. It is not in any normal sense a code of practice. 

This is an extreme instance of the relativist position. It would, for example, allow British software engineers to work in other coimtries on control systems for gas chambers or record systems intended to ensure that all female children were circumcised. They would not be subject to censure by the BCS because they would be working in a different cultural area and so they adjusted their actions to suit . One does not have to be an ethical absolutist to find this approach distasteful and few would claim that condemning mass killings was cultural imperialism. 

A breach of ethics or a courageous show of ethics is frequently newsworthy. An example of a breach of ethics is that of an MIT student who used university hardware to distribute commercial software over the Internet. Recent examples of a more courageous show of ethics, which are presented as case studies by the WWW Ethics Center for Engineering and Science, include... 

Engineers ability to address ethical issues related to technology advancement, e.g., privacy issues in computer software/conununication and... 

Answers to the questions why RE is needed and what is its role in Concurrent Engineering can be found in Sect. 12.2, accompanied with related studies. The RE process, data acquisition process and the most common non-contact scanning methods are described in Sect. 12.3. Importance of material characteristics, durability and life limitations are given in Sect. 12.4. Tools for RE, especially software tools for data processing, are presented in Sect. 12.5. Section 12.6 presents applications of the RE methods in different areas automotive industry, railways, machinery, architecture, archaeology and medicine. Ethical and legal issues considering RE are discussed in Sect. 12.7, followed by brief conclusions and an outlook. 

The ethics of such situations are seldom clear-cut or even defined at all. UK Chartered Engineers will shortly have a Code of Practice to follow (produced by the Engineering Council) and to which the existing By Laws and Codes of Conduct of the traditional engineering institutions will be expected to be adapted. However, many developers of safety-critical systems owe no allegiance to such institutions, and software designers are notoriously loath to conform to such disciplines. 

---