Incorporating Ethical Values into Software Architecture Design Practices

Software systems are ubiquitously employed in societies, while they can be manipulative and discriminatory. Such systems often appear to misalign with common societal ethics. Our understanding of ethical values, what they mean, and how they are exhibited through software systems is limited. There are hardly any considerations, standards, and procedures to elicit, interpret and design for ethical values during software architecture activities. This study aims to understand ethical aspects in architecting software. We discuss (i) awareness of practitioners about ethical issues, (ii) recognizing stakeholders who may have ethical concerns, (iii) identifying ethical values during architecture design, (iv) difficulties that practitioners face from the ethical point of view, and (v) quantifying and validating ethical values. The goal of the current work is to improve ethical considerations in software architecture design. To this end, we carried out an exploratory focus group with four practicing software architects. Their experiences provided us with preliminary insights on architecting with ethical values.

Automated summary

This article discusses ethical issues in software architecture, pointing out the limited understanding and representation of ethical values in software systems. The article explores practitioners' awareness and recognition of ethical issues, identification of stakeholders with ethical concerns, determination of ethical values in architecture design, challenges faced by practitioners from an ethical perspective, as well as quantifying and validating ethical values. The goal of this research is to improve ethical considerations in software architecture design.