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The Ethics of Software Project
Management

Glisa Gabriel

Introduction

 Software project management is the collection of
techniques used to develop and deliver various
types of software products
 Developing software is frequently complicated
involving many people from different areas and
with different skills, experiences and social
attitudes.
 All of these methods have as a major function
the attempt to anticipate and avoid all
possibilities which may negatively impact a
software project.
 Effective software project management is a vital
ingredient in achieving a successful outcome

Applying Ethics
 Relevant ethical principles must be established in order to identify
the ethical issues associated with software project management.
 By combining and building upon the ideas of McLeod and Velasquez
a set of ethical principles can be derived:
◦ Honour Is the action considered beyond reproach?
◦ Honesty Will the action violate any explicit or implicit agreement
or trust?
◦ Bias Are there any external considerations that may bias the
action to be taken?
◦ Professional adequacy Is the action within the limits of capability?
◦ Due care Is the action to be exposed to the best possible quality
assurance standards?
◦ Fairness Are all stakeholder's views considered with regard to
the action?
◦ Consideration of social cost Is the appropriate accountability and
responsibility accepted with respect to this
action?
◦ Effective and efficient action Is the action suitable, given the objectives
set, and is it to be completed using the
least expenditure of resources?

Generic Software Project
Management
 SPM comprises ten steps as shown below. The first five
steps are concerned with planning and the remaining
five deal with implementing the plan and achieving the
goal.
◦ Visualise what the goal is
◦ Make a list of the jobs that need to be done
◦ Ensure there is one leader
◦ Assign people to jobs
◦ Manage expectations, allow a margin of error and have a
fallback position
◦ Use an appropriate leadership style
◦ Know what is going on
◦ Tell people what is going on
◦ Repeat Step 1 through 8 until Step 10 can be achieved
◦ Realise the project goal

Ethical Management
 The eight ethical principles can be used to provide an
insight to how ethical management might be achieved.
The activities within each of the ten steps of SPM have
been analysed in order to identify the dominant ethical
issues of each step.
 Step 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Principle
1. Honour X X X X X
2. Honesty X XX X
3. Bias XX XX X X
4. Adequacy X X X
5. Due care X X X X X
6. Fairness X X X
7. Social cost X XX X
8. Action XXX XX XX
6 2 4 5 4 4 1 5 2 4

Scope of Consideration

 Stakeholders. As mentioned previously,
establishing the right scope of
consideration is essential in defining
acceptable project goals.
 Stakeholder Identification. use a rights
model to help identify relevant
stakeholders.
 Involvement. Once the stakeholders
have been identified, it is necessary to
seek their involvement in the
development process in order to meet
their rights in the most effective way.

Generic Software Development
Impact Statement
 One way of addressing the need to modify
project goals in a formal way is to use a
modification of a social impact statement. A
social impact statement is modelled on an
environmental impact statement which is
required before major construction is
undertaken.
 The environmental impact statement is
supposed to specify the potential negative
impacts on the environment of the proposed
construction and specify what actions will be
taken to minimise those impacts.

Elements in the Generic SoDIS
form (software devlopment
impact statement)
 All software project management plans will include
similar elements to those included in this model. This
plan starts with a project overview which generally
states the functions desired, called the requirements,
for the software by the customer and constraints on the
development process such as time, budget, and
resources.
 This constitutes the developer's contract with the
customer. What we propose with a SoDIS is to broaden
the developer's contract to include a commitment to
develop a product which is ethically sensitive. The
Generic SoDIS would be part of the deliverables section
of the software project management plan.

Specific Software Development
Impact Statement
 Work Breakdown Structure. Most software
project management models proceed by
decomposing each task into smaller more
manageable tasks. These smaller tasks are
then carefully described in terms of resource
needs, costs and expected time to complete.
 Once a project is decomposed in this way,
the costs of the individual tasks are added
together to estimate the total project cost.
These individual task descriptions are
elaborated and included in the software
project management plan.

Conclusion
 Just as producing software of high quality should be second nature
to the software engineer so should producing software that is
ethically sensitive. Indeed there is clearly an overlap in these two
requirements.
 The project management process for software development must
accommodate an ethical perspective. The major criticism of current
practice is that any ethical consideration tends to be implicit rather
than explicit which has a tendency to devalue the importance of the
ethical dimension.
 By using ethical principles, identifying of ethical hotspots and using
SoDIS it is possible to ensure that the key ethical issues are properly
addressed as an integral part of the software development process.
 Quite simply, project management should be guided by a sense of
justice, a sense of equal distributions of benefits and burdens and a
sense of equal opportunity. In this way software development project
management will become ethically aligned.

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