Advancing the Study of Human Values in Software Engineering

This paper makes the case for the study of human values in Software Engineering (SE) as a highly important emerging area of research with significant societal implications. We offer two key principles in order to advance this research agenda: firstly, the significance of values as distinguished from, though connected to, ethics; and secondly, the need for clear theoretical frameworks for values study. We provide the emerging findings from an initial study (N=12 participants) using a Values Q-Sort tool that was designed in accordance with these two principles. We conclude with discussion around lessons learnt, ongoing challenges, and future directions

Meet your Maker : A Social Identity Analysis of Robotics Software Engineering

Software systems often reflect the values of the people that engineered them: it is vital to understand and engineer those values systematically. This is crucial for autonomous systems, where human interventions are not always possible. The software engineering community shows some positive values - like altruism - and lack others - like diversity. In this project, we propose to elicit the values of the engineers of autonomous systems by analysing the artefacts they produce. We propose to build on the social identity theory to identify encouraged and discouraged behaviours within this collective. Our goal is to understand, diagnose, and improve the engineering culture behind autonomous system development

Kind computing

Kindness can boost happiness and wellbeing. It can benefit individuals (e.g., increasing resilience) as well as society (e.g., increasing trust). With digital technology permeating our daily lives, there are increasing opportunities for such technology to enable, mediate, and amplify kindness in society. In this paper, we propose kind computing, a new computing paradigm that explicitly incorporates kindness into the development and use of digital technology. We envisage software engineering as a discipline that can deliver such technology. However, software engineering techniques do not provide explicit abstractions, formalisms, and tools to consider, analyse, and implement software that delivers such technology. With reference to related work, we elaborate on kind computing and the role of software engineering in enabling it, identify open research challenges, elicit three categories of kind computing requirements, and sketch a research agenda for future work

Socio-Technical Resilience for Community Healthcare

Older adults at home frequently rely on ‘circles of support’ which range from relatives and neighbours, to the voluntary sector, social workers, paid carers, and medical professionals. Creating, maintaining, and coordinating these circles of support has often been done manually and in an ad hoc manner. We argue that a socio-technical system that assists in creating, maintaining, and coordinating circles of support is a key enabler of community healthcare for older adults. In this paper we propose a framework called SERVICE (SocioTechnical Resilience for the Vulnerable) to help represent, reason about, and coordinate these circles of support and strengthen their capacity to deal with variations in care needs and environment. The objective is to make these circles resilient to changes in the needs and circumstances of older adults. Early results show that older adults appreciate the ability to represent and reflect on their circle of support

Socio-Technical Resilience for Community Healthcare

Older adults at home frequently rely on ‘circles of support’ which range from relatives and neighbours, to the voluntary sector, social workers, paid carers, and medical professionals. Creating, maintaining, and coordinating these circles of support has often been done manually and in an ad hoc manner. We argue that a socio-technical system that assists in creating, maintaining, and coordinating circles of support is a key enabler of community healthcare for older adults. In this paper we propose a framework called SERVICE (Socio-Technical Resilience for the Vulnerable) to help represent, reason about, and coordinate these circles of support and strengthen their capacity to deal with variations in care needs and environment. The objective is to make these circles resilient to changes in the needs and circumstances of older adults. Early results show that older adults appreciate the ability to represent and reflect on their circle of support

Responsible Software Engineering: Requirements and Goals

In this chapter, we provide an introduction to the discipline of requirements engineering as part of the software engineering process. We indicate how to elicit, articulate, and organize the goals of complex software systems as an explicit expression of the requirements that the proposed or existing software system is expected to achieve and maintain, including what the system should avoid performing. We advocate that system requirements goals can and should be used to explicitly capture, express, and reason about the diverse digital humanism values which are of concern in socio-technical systems. This is an essential aspect of responsible software engineering

Human empowerment in self-adaptive socio-technical systems

Recent advances in generative AI and machine learning have stirred up fears about the unbridled adoption of autonomous, self-adaptive decision mechanisms in socio-technical systems. This vision paper explores the critical relationship between software-intensive systems and the empowerment of humans as individuals and society. We highlight the need for human empowerment within the context of self-adaptive socio-technical systems (SASTSs), which require mechanisms for balancing of diverse needs, values, and ethics on the individual, community, and societal levels. We propose an architecture comprised of Connector and Mediator elements, and third-party auditing, to support interactions and ensure preservation of human needs, values, and ethics. We use an example of Robot-Assisted A&E Triage system to motivate and illustrate our work and discuss some open challenges for future research

Kurzreview: Identifikation offener Forschungsfragen zur Integration ethischer Anforderungen in Softwareentwicklungsprozesse

Die gesamtgesellschaftliche Bedeutung von Software nimmt seit etwa zwei Jahrzehnten beständig zu. Auch wenn Anwenderinnen und Anwender dies nicht immer reflektieren, wirkt Software sich an vielen Stellen längst nicht mehr nur auf unternehmerische, sondern auch auf individuelle und teils höchstpersönliche Entscheidungs- und Meinungsbildungsprozesse aus, wobei es neben von den Softwareherstellern beabsichtigten auch zu zahlreichen unbeabsichtigten Effekten kommt. Vor diesem Hintergrund stellt sich die Frage, inwieweit menschliche Ethik – und menschliche Werte – bei der Entwicklung von Algorithmen etwa zur Bewerberauswahl in Unternehmen oder zur Verbreitung politischer Inhalte in Sozialen Netzen Berücksichtigung finden. Das hier vorgelegte kursorische Kurzreview soll einen ersten Überblick des Themenfeldes liefern sowie die Identifikation derzeit offener Fragestellungen von zentraler Bedeutung sowie wesentlicher laufender Projekte im betrachteten Forschungsfeld unterstützen

A value sensitive approach to communicate with users and designers in cross-cultural contexts

PhD ThesisCulture is embodied in many aspects of the identity of an individual. This makes it a critical component of understanding the design of technology for its intended users. Cross-Cultural Design has emerged as an approach to incorporate culture in the design of technology using off-the-shelf cultural studies. However, relatively little work has focused on how to approach culture and how to integrate cultural insights in the design of technologies. Additionally, the design space of this thesis, namely cultural values and how they impact the visibility of women in the digital media, is largely under-explored. The research presented in this thesis investigates how to develop value sensitive methods for conducting and communicating culturally specific research. This thesis presents an investigation on the visibility of Saudi women in the digital media using culturally specific methods. Following the Value Sensitive Design methodology in this context, this thesis describes: how I propose a bottom up approach to define culture, enabling value sensitive methods for user research that informs the design of technology; how I approach the integration of these cultural values in evaluating existing systems and develop an implicit value eliciting method; and how I adopt a Double Ethnography approach to develop effective methods for communicating culturally specific research to a multifunctional team of designers. In response to this context, I introduce two communication methods: Scenario Co-Creation Cards and Research Snippets, addressing these requirements. Scenario Co-Creating Cards are a novel value eliciting method which incorporate the cultural value of the users, while Research Snippets are a research communication method, which help designers to understand culturally specific research. In presenting the findings of a real-world deployment and evaluation of these two methods, this thesis contributes to current discourse in HCI on how to conceptualize cultural research to bridge the communication gap between user researchers and designers. This thesis is inspired by Vision 2030 (National Transformation Plan) in which women are supported to fully participate in all aspects of Saudi society. The past few years have witnessed ground-breaking reforms in Saudi Arabia to improve the rights and mobility of women. A major part of the reform was transforming the public sphere to be more accommodating to women, including their appointment to leadership positions. This thesis aims at understanding how to promote and support the visibility of women within their frames of cultural and individual values. We built this understanding from the voices of transnational Saudi women who have experienced a higher level of visibility. However, by improving our understanding of how to design across cultures, this work should contribute toward Vision 2030, helping to empower and support the visibility of all women across the entire nation.Saudi Cultural Mission through the national scholarship progra

Investigating Cultural Dimensions via Developers Artefacts: The Utility of Repository Mining

A growing body of research is using artefacts from online development communities to explore the impact of developers’ behaviours on the software development process. Although this research has produced many insights, researchers have yet to fully explore the impact of developers’ cultural backgrounds on their behaviours in an online community, although such understandings could be useful for helping the community to understand and plan for team dynamics. This study utilised a pragmatic case study to explore the relationship between culture and online behaviour among developers from the United States (U.S.), China, and Russia—three countries that differ in their orientations as individualistic or collectivist cultures. The data for the study comprised artefacts supplied over an 11-year period by users of Stack Overflow1, a popular online programming community that addresses questions from members by providing them with rapid access to the knowledge and expertise of their peers. Artefacts consisted of developers’ questions and answers, personal profiles, Up and Down voting records, online reputations, and earned badges. Data mining techniques, as well as statistical, linguistic, and content analysis were used to compare artefacts from the three groups of developers based on their cultural orientation as individualistic or collectivistic, attitudes, and interaction and knowledge sharing patterns. The findings revealed differences among the three groups that were consistent with their cultural backgrounds. U.S. developers, who are from an individualistic culture, asked and responded to more questions, had higher average reputations, used the pronoun “I” more frequently, and were more task- focused. Conversely, Chinese developers, who are from a collectivistic culture, provided more extensive commenting and editing of posts, used the pronouns “we” and “you” more frequently, and were more likely to engage in information exchange. Russian developers had been using Stack Overflow the longest and were the most reflective. The cultural patterns identified in this study have numerous implications for enhancing in- group interactions and behaviour management among software development communities