Interpreting Codes of Ethics in Global Software Engineering

Today software engineering is a global activity. Frequently groups of people from all over the world collaborate on the development of one system or work is outsourced. Western companies send development work to Asia and increasingly to Eastern Europe. The differences between cultures and the problems these differences create, are plentiful. Many professional organizations guide their members towards good, ethical behaviour by codes of ethics. In this paper we investigate the culture-relative interpretations of these codes of ethics and the guidance they provide for global teams and collaboration. We analyse the codes of ethics of the ACM (US), CSI (India), IPSJ (Japan), HKCS (Hong Kong) and EI (Ireland). We study the word of the codes to examine whether they explicitly address ethical dilemmas caused by global interactions. To further investigate the ethical guidance provided by the codes we apply them to three case questions that one could raise in a global software engineering setting. Our work differs from that of others in that it examines the practical applicability of codes of ethics instead of their contents and that we do not limit the work to examine different culture-relative interpretations of just a single problem. During our analysis we did not find imperatives that directly hinder global interaction, but unfortunately we were also unable to find any that sufficiently address (i.e., support) this topic. Only one of the studied codes asks to consider cultural differences. While answering the case questions using the imperatives from the aforementioned codes, the influences of the cultural perspectives needed to interpret the words becomes clear. For example, we learn that the concept of privacy is explained very differently in the US and Japan. So even when codes of ethics seem to agree in words, ethical attitude and hence the interpretation of these codes is strongly influenced by one’s cultural perspective. We conclude that all studied codes would benefit from more explicit guidelines for those professionals that work in global software engineering. Future work could examine how this may best be achieved within each culture.