Getting to the Source of Ethical Issues

Research with open source software (OSS) raises the same ethical issues as other disciplines in which publicly released materials are the objects of study, and the creators of those materials are still living. These disciplines are literary and artistic criticism and public policy research. As El-Emam (this issue) mentioned there are also similarities to research employing internet newsgroup posts as data.Les recherches effectu\ue9es dans le domaine des logiciels \ue0 code source libre soul\ue8vent les m\ueames probl\ue8mes d'\ue9thique que dans les autres disciplines, o\uf9 des documents diffus\ue9s dans le public font l'objet d'\ue9tudes, alors que leurs auteurs sont toujours vivants. La critique litt\ue9raire, la critique artistique et les recherches sur les politiques gouvernementales constituent de telles disciplines. Comme le mentionne \ue9galement M. El Emam (dans ce num\ue9ro), il existe \ue9galement des similitudes avec les recherches qui font appel \ue0 des documents diffus\ue9s par des groupes de nouvelles sur l'Internet.Peer reviewed: YesNRC publication: Ye

Why and how research ethics matters to you, yes YOU!

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Ethical Issues in Empirical Studies of Software Engineering

The popularity of empirical methods in software engineering research is on the rise. Surveys, experiments, metrics, case studies, and field studies are examples of empirical methods used to investigate both software engineering processes and products. The increased application of empirical methods has also brought about an increase in discussions about adapting these methods to the peculiarities of software engineering. In contrast, the ethical issues raised by empirical methods have received little, if any, attention in the software engineering literature. This article is intended to introduce the ethical issues raised by empirical research to the software engineering research community, and to stimulate discussion of how best to deal with these ethical issues. Through a review of the ethical codes of several fields that commonly employ humans and artifacts as research subjects, we have identified major ethical issues relevant to empirical studies of software engineering. These issues are illustrated with real empirical studies of software engineering

Consent Issues Raised by Observational Research in Organisations

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The economics of garbage collection

This paper argues that economic theory can improve our understanding of memory management. We introduce the allocation curve, as an analogue of the demand curve from microeconomics. An allocation curve for a program characterises how the amount of garbage collection activity required during its execution varies in relation to the heap size associated with that program. The standard treatment of microeconomic demand curves (shifts and elasticity) can be applied directly and intuitively to our new allocation curves. As an application of this new theory, we show how allocation elasticity can be used to control the heap growth rate for variable sized heaps in Jikes RVM

The Polarity Fallacy

There are multifarious ways in which two terms can be “polar,” and this sometimes leads to confusion and fallacious reasoning. This paper identifies a fallacy of reasoning that arises from one such confusion