Abstract
Ethical, legal and social implications are widely regarded as important considerations with respect to technological developments. Agile Worth-Oriented Systems Engineering (AWOSE) is an innovative approach to incorporating ethically relevant criteria during agile development processes through a flexibly applicable methodology. First, a predefined model for the ethical evaluation of socio-technical systems is used to assess ethical issues according to different dimensions. The second part of AWOSE ensures that ethical issues are not only identified, but also systematically considered during the design of systems based on information and communication technology. For this purpose, the findings from the first step are integrated with approaches from worth-centered development into a process model that, unlike previous approaches to ethical system development, is thoroughly compatible with agile methodologies like Scrum or Extreme Programming. Artifacts of worth-centered development called Worth Maps have been improved to guide the prioritization of development tasks as well as choices among design alternatives with respect to ethical implications. Furthermore, the improved Worth Maps facilitate the identification of suitable criteria for system evaluations in association to ethical concerns and desired positive outcomes of system usage. The potential of the AWOSE methodology has been demonstrated in the context of a technical system (smart glasses for cognitive assistance) that supports elderly and people with particular handicaps.
Highlights
The discovery of nuclear fission by German scientists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann during World War II led to research on nuclear chain reactions culminating in the creation of the first nuclear weapons by the U.S during the Manhattan Project
Less extensive guidance has been offered regarding approaches to systematic handling of ethical issues during actual development processes for systems based on information and communication technology (ICT)
The three roles get together for a meeting in which the developer reports on the expected costs for implementing pending features, the worth designer updates the Worth Map with relevant new information that has been gathered in the meantime, and the customer decides upon the features that shall be designed in the iteration
Summary
The discovery of nuclear fission by German scientists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann during World War II led to research on nuclear chain reactions culminating in the creation of the first nuclear weapons by the U.S during the Manhattan Project. Since its creation in 2013, MEESTAR has proven a useful instrument for identifying and assessing a broad range of ethical issues in different research and development projects It does not indicate how these issues should be handled with respect to the concrete design and implementation of system components. Worth Map diagrams in AWOSE use relationship notations from Unified Modeling Language (UML) structure diagrams when required, i.e. specific types of lines and arrows to indicate relations between elements such as implementation, dependency, or composition This is especially useful for the layers containing technical descriptions (e.g. system components and features).
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