Ethics-driven Software Architecture Decision Making

Abstract

Context. Software systems play a pervasive role in people's lives. Since ethics in software systems is hardly ever considered as a first-class entity, its support of, or hindrance to, values of users and society is usually neglected. Addressing ethics requires both to consider the context in which a software system is used, and the fact that ethical values (e.g., social, cultural and personal) are intrinsically ambiguous and subjective. Software architecture and architecture design decision making are the right levels of abstraction to both consider such a context, and support reasoning about such subjectivities. Goal. We aim to embed ethical aspects in software architecture design decision making. We have studied the state of the art in ethics for software engineering, to identify the ethical aspects influencing software architecture design. We will use the learned ethical aspects to (i) support architecture design decision making with respect to ethics through proposing methods, models, and techniques, and (ii) conduct empirical studies to evaluate them in industrial practice. Method. We will adopt a design science approach for our research which includes three phases: (i) problem understanding, (ii) solution design, and (iii) solution validation. Results. Based on our previous literature study, we build models (and techniques) embedding the ethical aspects to be used in architecture design decision making. Also, we will apply design science research to use and validate these models in a method assisting practitioners and architects to embed ethical aspects in software architecture design.