Code of Ethics
This exercise is intended to introduce you the professional codes that define the
ethical behavior of a professional programmer. After reading the resources at the bottom of the page, critically analyze
the situations
below according to established Codes of Conduct. Hopefully, this will help you to recognize situations
which create ethical and professional difficulties.
Compare and Contrast
At the bottom of this page are links to the codes of ethics for the ACM,
IEEE, and Computer
Ethics Institute. You are to read each code (they are very short :) and then
discuss each with respect to how up-to-date,
comprehensive, and reasonable it is. In your comparisons, you should consider
when the code was written, the role of the organization that created the code,
and comfortable you would be following the code.
Situations
Now consider how the codes you
reviewed above apply to some specific situations. For each of the situations
given below, determine if the person involved has violated any of the clauses of
the codes of ethics you reviewed above? If so, specify which and why?
Additionally, does any code suggest or imply any specific action on the part of
the person involved?
- Chris is on a co-op assignment with a well known company and the manager
assigns Chris to write a program that will reside in the server system of
the programming division that will keep track of the activities of each
programmer in the group. Among the data to be collected are the number of
times the compiler is accessed, the number of error messages returned, and
the general statistics on the types of error encountered. The manager
suggests that this data will be very useful in knowing what additional
training in programming techniques are required in the division.
- Pat hacks into the systems of the Enormous Telecommunications Company
(ETC) and copies a file that describes certain details of ETC's delicate
switching equipment. When Pat is nabbed by the Feds, Pat is charged with
theft. But the document is provided essentially for free by ETC to anyone
for the price of postage.
- Robin works for the American Energy Corporation and leads the team that
created a new software program that controls the cooling systems on Nuclear
reactors. During testing and simulation, the program ran perfectly on
reactors in America. The system was so successful, that Italy wanted to
purchase this system. When the system was installed in a nuclear reactor in
Italy, it failed and the reactor had a melt down. Afterwards, it was
determined that the failure was caused because the original testing and
simulation was done under the American Measuring System and not the Metric
System.
Resources
Comments?