Exploring Ethics in Requirements Engineering

Abstract

There is a growing interest in the ethical dimension of software engineering, especially concerning privacy and security. However, within the phase of requirements engineering, there is a lack of scientific literature that addresses ethical awareness or that identifies ethical issues that may arise during and from the processes of requirements engineering. This thesis explores ethical issues that emerge from software from a requirements engineering perspective to raise ethical awareness about the ethical implications of software.

Both a systematic literature review (SLR) and grey literature review (GLR) were conducted to capture ethical issues from peer-reviewed literature and grey literature, respectively. Peer-reviewed literature provided us with 98 ethical issues and grey literature with 34 ethical issues. Combined, these ethical issues can function as a ethics pattern library for future research of a Code of Ethics. Finally, machine learning techniques were explored for their usability in identifying ethical issues from requirements in requirements engineering. Textual bigrams proved to be the most useful for identifying ethical issues.