A review of practices suitable for ethics-aware software engineering

Abstract

Research shows that the lack of ethical practices for regulating human behaviour and ethical judgment in software development is a concern. The lack of ethical practices leads to the development of software which is not in line with the ethical needs of software stakeholders. The consideration of the ethical needs of stakeholders and their integration into the software process requires knowledge of the relevant practices. This study sought to identify and synthesise ethical practices suitable for supporting ethics-aware software engineering. To achieve the objective of this study literature review was conducted based on search keywords. This study determined that ethics awareness, enforcement, decision-making, evaluation, and governance are integral ethical practices for achieving ethics-aware software engineering practice to cater for stakeholder ethical needs. Although the findings of this study are based on literature sources, future empirical studies should be conducted to validate the combination of these ethical practices to determine how they can support ethics-aware software engineering practice.