Framework for Software Requirements Engineering Ethics
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Date
2025-05
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Ethics has an extensive array of uses throughout many fields of study and in diverse circumstances. Ethics significantly impacts decisions made in requirements engineering. Requirements engineering is a fundamental process in software development projects. At the same time, it is a difficult phase and exposes to many ethical problems. In software engineering, many well-known codes of ethics address a wide range of issues that are significant for software engineers with different perspectives. However, it is found to be challenging to follow and implement them in the day-to-day work of software engineers.
This research aimed to study ethical issues raised in requirements engineering processes. In this research, we investigated requirements engineering ethical concerns. Data were collected from seven case software companies using interviews and focus group discussions.
Themantic qualitative analysis is employed to analyse the collected data. The analysis result revealed that companies lack industry practices, use of professional code of conduct standards, methods, or any other ethical guidelines to be followed during requirements engineering. Based on the analysis, one hundred seventy six codes, thirty four categories and five themes emerged. The five main themes include importance, practice, fundamental ethical concerns, management-related problems, and methods.
In this research, we proposed a framework with five basic components for software requirements engineering ethics to address critical ethical concerns which were
screened and identified during the analysis per their imprance to achieve the research questions. These components are Ethics for Knowledge Gap, Ethics for Requirements Identification, Ethics for Requirements Quality, Ethics for Unwillingness, and Ethics for doing Unpermitted Activities. Each of them gives specific pieces of advice that can be solutions to address the identified requirements engineering ethical concerns.
The validity and reliability of the proposed framework were evaluated using an expert evaluation involving five-point Likert scale questionnaires and focus group discussions. Additionally, open-ended questionnaires are used. The experts are purposively selected from the software industries.
The evaluation results indicate that the suggested framework is beneficial to use it as a daily guideline. It can be used as an advising guide for software engineers to minimize the occurrence of those identified ethical concerns during requirements engineering.
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Keywords
Concerns, Categories, Components, Ethics, Evaluation, Framework, Requirements Engineering, Validity