What is Discussed About Software Engineering Ethics on Stack Exchange (Q&A) Websites? A Case Study

Abstract

Software engineering ethics has been an interest of the software engineering community for over two decades, as evidenced by the creation of the joint ACM/IEEE-CS Soft-ware Engineering Code of Ethics. When reviewing the cur-rent software engineering literature, it was found that Stack Exchange question-and-answer (Q&A) websites are particularly good means of gaining a better understanding on a given subject: what topics are addressed within a subject area, the popularity of these topics, and the difficulty of these topics. As such, this paper utilizes Stack Exchange Q&A websites to review software engineering ethics and presents a case study that aims to provide a better understanding of the presence of software engineering ethics on three popular Stack Exchange Q&A websites, which are Stack Overflow (SO), Software Engineering (SE), and Project Management (PM). The study analyzes over 2,170 posts, using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), to better understand what ethic-related topics are discussed. Subsequently, the authors analyzed the popularity and difficulty of each identified topic. The study found that users discuss six ethic-related topics, which are as follows: web scraping, software quality, software security, open-source software usage, team and employers, and software billing. Moreover, the results revealed that software security is the most popular and the most difficult topic. This study highlights ethic-related challenges that are faced by Q&A website users. Software practitioners, researchers, and educators can utilize the results presented in this study to pursue new avenues when addressing pressing issues related to software engineering ethics.