SENG4921 Professional Issues and Ethics
Assignment 1
Professionalism, Engineering and Software Engineering

31st March 2006

Due date: Friday 5th May 2006
Weighting: 30%
Submission: To be advised

Plagiarism

This assignment will be subjected to rigorous similarity analysis.

• clearly you may, indeed you are encouraged, include material from other sources, but you must cite.
• it is expected that there will be original content in your answers.

Learning Objectives

On completion of this assignment you should have a better understanding of:

• the requirements of various common professions;
• Engineering as a profession;
• the meaning of Professionalism and its relevance to Software Engineering;
• an understanding of the role of design in engineering;
• a better understanding of risks in system design, implementation and deployment;
• a better idea of how to deal with software as a component;
• what is needed for ``Software Engineering'' to be an Engineering Profession;
• the impact of digital technology on access to information and intellectual property.

General Instructions

Question 1: Codes of Ethics and Professionalism (approx. 1,200 words)

1. Explore the concept of professionalism in disciplines such as, medicine, law, architecture, and (traditional) engineering using the ideas Stephen Cohen presented in his lectures on Ethics and Professionalism. Carefully describe, compare and contrast the professional codes you find for those professions.

2. Carry out the same exercise on the ACM, ACS and IEEE-CS/ACM (Software Engineering) codes of ethics.

3. Compare and contrast your findings in item 1 and item 2 above.

Question 2: Information in the Digital Age (approx. 1,200 words)

This question is concerned with the impact of digital technology on the enabling of access to information and to controlling access to information. This question is about the dramatic increases in mobility of digital information compared with hard-copy information, with copyright and whether it is sustainable, about digital techniques for enforcing copyright, about rights and duties. This is a very vexed and controversal area and you are unlikely to produce much resolution. You should:

• seek out as many references as you can;
• identify the ethical and professional issues involved;
• evaluate those issues as carefully as you can. Use Stephen Cohen's lectures to guide for your reasoning.

  You may wish to consider the Six Thinking Hats, and use a number of hats and be careful with the Red hat.

The following are some references to get you started:

The significance of digital information

Nicholas Negroponte: A Bill of Writes,

Nicholas Negroponte: Being Digital

Digital Rights Management

Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA),

DMCA,

Digital Rights Management (DRM),

Windows Media DRM

Digital Rights

Campaign for Digital Rights,

Open Digitial Rights Language (ODRL),

Roger Clarke's Consumer Rights Movement

Remember The above is meant to provide a starting point; you should explore beyond those references.

Question 3: Therac 25 isn't just about bad programming and nor is it about hardware interlocks? (approx. 1200 words)

The title of this question is intended to provoke. You now have a considerable range of knowledge of some systems: Therac 25, Killer Robot (fictional), and Ariane 5. In all cases the final failure was due to software. Or was it? This question is concerned with tackling system design and development. In the case of the above systems this is retrospective design and development. As part of your discussion you are free to seek out other system falures. You should consider the following:

• Is it too simplistic to treat the failure of these systems as primarily a software problem? It is true that the software contained serious errors, but is that good enough reason to justify that conclusion? Every piece of software, as indeed any other structure, has a failure mode, so how do you design for that?
• All (new) technologies have caused human deaths, so is software any different?

Given your answers to the above, this question asks you to describe in detail how you would go about the engneering development of a system such as Therac 25 so that you have reasonable confidence that the system is safe. In answering this question you may choose a particular system.

How would you express your confidence?

Note: this is not an exercise in being smart after the fact, it is an exercise in determining how such a development can be brought to completion with a minimal risk to the users of the machine. It is about recognising that it is not satisfactory to regard embedded software as a totally reliable or unreliable component.

Sources, Citations and Bibliography

Form of Assignment Submission

• Where an assignment has been done by 2 students, only one assignment should be submitted.
• The assignment must have a title page, which should contain:
  • Course Id and Name,
  • Assignment Details,
  • Student Id and Name of each student completing the assignment,
  • Seminar Id/Day and Time as well as each Facilitator's name.

Reports must be presented in a format suitable for senior management (i.e. suitable layout, no spelling and grammatical errors).

The report must be converted to a single PDF file and submitted as described above.

Late penalties

Late assignments attract a 10% deduction on the graded mark for every day they are late.