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?

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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

• ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct
• IEEE Software Engineering Code of Ethics and Professional Practice
• The Ten Commandments of Computer Ethics, Computer Ethics Institute, The Brookings Institute, Washington DC
• Using the New ACM Code of Ethics in Decision Making, Anderson et al., CACM 36, pp. 98-107 (Feb. 1993)