Softwtre Engineering Ethical Principles based on Islamic Values

Abstract

Software is the core for computer-based applications became an essential part for critical control systems, health and human life guard systems, financial and banking systems, scientific and educational, entertainments and other systems. Software is the core for such applications. It requires qualified software engineers: professionally and ethically. Literature review (L.R) and survey results show that software engineering professionals are facing several ethical-related problems which are costly, harmful and affected high ratio of people. Professional organizations like ACM, IEEE, ABET and CSAC have established codes of ethics to help software engineering professionals to understand and manage their ethical responsibilities. Islam considers ethics an essential factor to build individuals, communities and society. Islamic ethics are set of moral principles and guidance that recognizes what is right behavior from wrong, which are comprehensive, stable, fair, and historically prove success in building ethically great society. The estimated 1.5 billion of Muslims with tens of thousands of software engineers should have an effective role in software development and life, which requires them to understand and implement ethics, specially the Islamic ethics in their work. This paper is a frame-work or roadmap for modeling software engineering principle, which shows the main phases for solving such problem. It focuses mainly on adopting a new version of software engineering principle based on Islamic ethical values.