CSC 322.01, Class 07: Professional ethics

Overview

• Preliminaries
  • Notes and news
  • Upcoming work
  • Questions
• Background
• Key responsibilities
• Reflection: What responsibilities are particularly pertinent for your project?
• Time for groups to converse.

News / Etc.

• In CSC 322, it’s generally good to plan to sit with your group.
• Don’t be afraid to ask for help! (From me, from your classmates, from Adam, from the Interweb.)
• Office supplies in the commons. Free will donations.
• Please let me know ASAP if you notice things missing from the Web site. I’m still getting up to speed on Jekyll; this course suffers the most.
• Yes, you can schedule meetings with clients (and, soon, with mentors) during class time (other than Mondays). Just give me advance notice so that I can schedule other issues appropriately.
• Class time Wednesday will be spent on meeting with clients or just working as teams on user stories.
• Friday will be more ethics.

Upcoming work

• Readings for Friday:
  • Arvind Narayaan and Shannon Vallor (March 2014). Why software engineering courses should include ethics coverage. Communications of the ACM 57(3): 23-25. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2566966.
  • Neil McBride (August 2012). The ethics of software engineering should be an ethics for the client. Communications of the ACM. 55(8): 39-41. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2240250.
  • Deborah G. Johnson (October 2008). Computer experts: Guns-for-hire or professionals? Communications of the ACM 51(10): 24-26. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1400190.

Good things to do

Nope, no extra credit.

• CS Table, Tuesday, 7 Feb 2017. Something on privacy.
• Scholars Convocation, Thursday, 9 Feb 2017, 11:00 a.m., JRC 101. David Orr: Climate Change and the Crisis of American Democracy.
• Thursday extras, Thursday, 9 Feb 2017, 4:15 p.m., Science 3821: Something on computer graphics (visitor from UMN).

Questions

Please put the readings in the schedule.

• Okay.

Background

• Most of you, at some time or other, will be developing software.
• We do a lot of implicit consideration of your responsibilities as a software developer.
• We need some formal considerations, too.
• Our “software design” sequence is a natural home for such considerations.
  • We should do more early.
• These issues used to be in CSC 321.
• But you’re building the software in CSC 322, so that’s a good time to talk about it.
• Assumption: Most professions have codes of ethics. E.g., “Do know harm.”
  • Expresses standard expectations of behavior.
  • Guide professionals when they make difficult decisions
  • Allow prof organizations to censor professionals
  • Reminder to behave well
• Ideally, you have a deeper set of guiding moral and ethical principles that guide your behavior and that cohere with the stated codes of ethics.
• The guidelines have more force, because they have two professional organizations behind them.

Key responsibilities

Yay! We did a group reading. Sam asked random questions along the way and forgot to include them in the eboard.

Reflection: What responsibilities are particularly pertinent for your project?

Read through the responsibilities again as a group, and identify the three that seem most relevant to your project.

CS Course Planning

• 1.8. Honor confidentiality. Need to worry about student data. (As well as what the department chair tells you that may not be for public dissemination.)
• 2.3. Know laws, like FERPA.
• 2.6. Honor contracts. To Grinnell College and to SamR.
• But all of them are important.

SpamR

• 1.8. Honor confidentiality. What information in csstudents should not be public?
• 1.5. Observe copyright (and patent). We will likely steal a lot of code, so we should do so ethically.

Mayflower

Volunteer board

Job board