Towards Developing a Software Process Improvement Strategy Through the Application of Ethical Concepts

Aligning Software Process Improvement with the business and strategic goals of an enterprise is a core factor for process improvement. Achieving success in Software Process Improvement (SPI) has shown to be a problematic challenge for countless organisations. SPI, as a discipline, can be described as a set of use cases, each use case describing the logically related activities that must be undertaken. In addition, each use case is a description of the interactions between itself and the participants, i.e. the Actors. The nature of these interactions more often than not may demand, from the participant, the recognition, and fulfilment, of ethical duties. In this paper we customise a theoretical framework developed by the US Content Subcommittee of the Impact CS Steering Committee that specifies traditional moral and ethical concepts, which can be used to identify the moral issues concerning the Software Process Improvement field. An application of these conventional and generic ethical concepts is made to use cases such as: Determining Business Needs; Conducting Process Improvement Assessment; the Tailoring and Creation of Processes; and Deployment. In doing so a number of ethical issues are highlighted. In the application and utilisation of SPI: business process engineers, software engineering teams, process improvement managers, and so on must be aware of these ethical duties, which have been identified by the application of the moral and ethical concepts, as presented in this paper, in order to become more responsible professionals in general. We propose a set of heuristics for ethical engagement with the SPI discipline proposing that an effective SPI strategy must be underpinned with ethical consideration.