Ethics: What is the Brazilian Software Engineering Research Scenario?

Abstract

Background: Ethics is the theory or science of the moral behavior of humans in society. Traditionally, we value “unethical” actions that go against determining morality in a specific context. One of the sub-domains of Ethics is Computational Ethics, which deals with ethical dilemmas that are strictly related to computational issues. Dilemmas in this area involve privacy, improper access, intellectual property, digital norms and laws, power, socio-technical aspects (such as gender discrimination), and robotics, among others. In this context, “Software Engineering” and “Software” are different objects. Engineering is an act, a practice, as also coding, programming, and software reuse. As with any act, moral and subsequent ethical considerations are appropriate. We characterize software as an object of concrete reality, as a sociotechnical system formed by a technical artifact, human aspect, and procedural aspect. This assumption will form the main base discussion of ethics and morals in Software Engineering in this paper. Objective: The goal of this paper is to unveil the Brazilian Software Engineering ethics panorama. Method: We follow the rigor of, and inspired by, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) protocol to answer the question: how does ethics explicitly permeate the Brazilian Software Engineering publications between the last thirteen years (2010 and 2022)? Results: After analyzing 1529 papers through the research protocol, 175 (≈11%) presented some explicit occurrence of ethical aspects. The occurrence was relevant in only 7 papers (≈0.4%), exposing a shallow scenario on ethical or moral aspects. Conclusions: If Ethics is a topic considered important to deliberate, research or discuss, this did not occur significantly in the Brazilian Software Engineering research scenario since 2010. With this result in mind, we discussed parallel terms and concepts to enrich the contribution of the qualitative synthesis.