HW1: Chapter 1

1.3: What are the four important attributes that all professional software should possess? Suggest four other attributes that may sometimes be significant.

The four important attributes:

1. Acceptability
2. Dependability and security
3. Efficiency
4. Maintainability

Other suggestions:

1. Readability
2. Scalability
3. Conciseness
4. Flexibility

1.8: Discuss whether professional software engineers should be licensed in the same way as doctors or lawyers.

I believe most software engineers should be licensed, depending on the type of software they are constructing. One of the main reasons doctors and lawyers are licensed is the risk, sometimes life-or-death, associated with their professions. Licensing ensures that professionals have met certain education standards that qualify them to make the best decisions for their patients’ and clients’ fate. In the same way, if a software engineer works on programs that determine specifications for bridges, for example, the government should certainly license him/her to support public safety. This is just as important as licensing the engineers who build the bridge itself. Likewise, software engineers who work on programs that involve sensitive data such as credit card information and, hence, have great data-breach potential should be licensed. Similar to that of doctors and lawyers, the work of these engineers requires access to private data. Government licensing would ensure that they are educated about industry standards for handling that data and maintaining its privacy while performing their work. Other areas of software engineering such as web development may not involve enough risk to warrant licensing.

1.9: For each of the clauses in the ACM/IEEE Code of Ethics shown in Figure 1.4, propose an appropriate example that illustrates that clause.

1. PUBLIC - Implementing mechanisms to protect sensitive data belonging to the public that is used by the software. This could include credit card data, browsing data, social security numbers, and the like.

2. CLIENT AND EMPLOYER - Documenting functionality issues with software identified by the client or employer and making necessary fixes to maintain usability by the public.

3. PRODUCT - Planning for product improvements to maintain professionalism with up to changing standards. For example, integrating new safety mechanisms that have become standard in the industry

4. JUDGMENT - Declining a task due to lack of training. For example, declining a request to build in a language not yet known with an unreasonable timeframe to fully learn the language

5. MANAGEMENT - Requiring new engineers to go through an onboarding process which familiarizes them with company procedures and policies they will be held accountable for

6. PROFESSION - Setting up an internship program for college Computer Science students

7. COLLEAGUES - Exchanging code review with a colleague working on similar projects

8. SELF - Pursuing continuing education such as open source projects and online courses outside of work

1.10: To help counter terrorism, many countries are planning or have developed computer systems that track large numbers of their citizens and their actions. Clearly, this has privacy implications. Discuss the ethics of working on the development of this type of system.

The motivation behind the system, countering terrorism, is beneficial to society, but the software engineer has to balance this with preventing harm to the public in other ways such as the breach of sensitive data. Upholding this responsibility would require software engineers to account for and work to mitigate this risk at all stages of development. To approach this project ethically, they would need to consider how to protect the data from harmful use by either external or internal users. External protection would involve systems such as encryption to prevent access by unauthorized users. On the internal side, project leads should perform advanced background checks on engineers prior to employment. Even in the internal work environment, they would need to implement privacy mechanisms such as anonymizing personal identifiers within the database to engineers unless an unusual pattern is detected.

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• 2020 22