Linking software engineering paradigms to Islamic values

IIUC Studies, 2015

Globalization and digital convergence in the emerging knowledge society has raised complex ethical, legal and societal issues. We are faced with complex and difficult questions regarding the freedom of expression, access to information, the right to privacy, intellectual property rights, and cultural diversity. To overcome these issues, it requires qualified and educated IT (Information Technology) beneficiaries professionally and ethically. Professional organizations like ACM, IEEE and ABET have established codes of ethics to help IT professionals, specially end users to understand and manage their ethical responsibilities. Islamic ethics comprise moral principles and guidance that differentiate between right and wrong, which are comprehensive, stable, fair, and historically proved success in building ethically great societies. The estimated 1.5 billion of Muslims should have an effective role in IT related activities and life, which requires them to understand and implement ethics, specially the Islamic ethics in their IT related works. This paper is a roadmap for modeling the IT user principles, which show the main phases for solving such problems. It focuses mainly on adopting a new version of IT user principles based on Islamic ethical values.

Dilemmas 2015 Papers from the 18th annual International Conference Dilemmas for Human Services: Organizing, Designing and Managing, 2017

The aim of this paper is to analyze the ethical dilemmas that IT professionals in general, and software engineers in particular, face in the Balkans, specifically in Macedonia, Kosovo and Albania. In an environment where there is still an absence of policies regarding ethics and best practices, developers' perceptions and their dilemmas are investigated. The paper first gives a general overview of the social and cultural issues in these countries, and then follows an analysis of issues regarding software development, good and bad work practices, and developers' reactions to these issues. In this research, varying security and privacy compliance situations are explored through qualitative interviews of 6 developers that work in domestic and foreign developing companies in Macedonia, Kosovo and Albania: how they deal with dilemmas, how they make decisions and how they ensure that users are never harmed -was the objective of this investigation. Some conclusions are drawn based on participants' reported perceptions regarding these issues.

2006

Among the various contemporary schools of moral thinking, consequence-based ethics, as opposed to rule-based, seems to have a good acceptance among professionals such as software engineers. But naïve consequentialism is intellectually too weak to serve as a practical guide in the profession. Besides, the complexity of software systems makes it very hard to know in advance the consequences that will derive from professional activities in the production of software. Therefore, following the spirit of well-known codes of ethics such as the ACM/IEEE's, we advocate for a more solid position, which we call "moderate deontologism", that takes into account both rules and consequences to assess the goodness of actions, and at the same time pays an adequate consideration to the absolute values of human dignity.

Being a Muslim, it is our responsibility to obey the rules and p2rinciples defined by our religion (Islam) in all the walks of life. Without a doubt, Islam is a complete religion and it has addressed every aspect of life in a detailed manner. In this scenario, whether it is a matter of personal life, social life or professional life, Islam gives appropriate guidelines for all the aspects of life. In addition, we learn these principles and rules from Quran and Hadiths. In fact, it becomes our obligation to follow whatever is written in the Quran and Hadiths. But, in our daily lives, we have a large number of situations where we ignore these religious sayings. In fact, these situations occur in our lives so frequently that we have become used to these situations. This paper addresses some of these situations with respect to organizational environment where we ignore Islamic values and principles over other unimportant activities. In this paper, we have addressed these issues with respect to software development firms. The basic purpose of addressing these issues is to make software development firms and their employees responsive of their religious duties while performing their duties.

Postmodern Openings, 2020

Over the past 30 years, computer engineering has developed a lot. Currently, computer and software applications have a central role in business, medicine, security, communications, industry, education, and everyday life. Software developers, peoples who manage computer networks, data security analysts can do well, but they also have the potential to cause suffering and harm to the clients or ordinary peoples, willingly or not. For this reason, IT activities must be regulated by specific laws. From the beginning, we argue that the law is not the same thing as ethics, even if both promote the good. Certain ethical principles can be strengthened by law. In the field of computer science and technology, can exists theft, privacy violations, violence and harassment. To combat and punish such actions and behaviors, law is needed. But is software engineering a profession? If so, are there codes of professional ethics whereby specialists in the field can regulate their professional activity,...

2014

The paper examines the concept of ethics in different perspectives, ranging from Islamic, western and ICT respectively. It supports each of the discussion with scholars’ ideas and ultimately evidence from the Holy Quran and Hadith of prophet Mohammad (S.A.W). The paper asserts that ethics in ICT is view in different aspects. These aspects were extensively dwelled with supportive verses from the Holy Quran and Hadith of the Prophet Mohammad (S.A.S). The paper concludes by calling ICT developers to be conscious on the sensitivity of their work in promoting the entire Muslims lives. Keywords-ethics, ICT, Islam, Islamic point of view, ICT ethics, information security, privacy.

Information Systems (IS) ethics has seen a lot of attention in recent years (Smith and Hasnas, 1999). Ethics have been discussed so that IS professionals would contribute to society while and avoid harming others (Smith and Hasnas, 1999). IS developers and software engineers mostly focus on developing a product and usually are unaware of unethical behaviour that might occur throughout the process of development (Berenbach and Broy, 2009). This makes it essential to study the moral and ethical challenges that an IS developer might face. Many studies before have focused on such issues (Singer and Vinson, 2002). As a result of these studies different Software engineering Codes of ethics have been written and the effects of these codes have been studied (Gotterbarn, 1999). In 1972 the Association for Computer Machinery (ACM) developed a set of codes of ethics. The ACM codes were reviewed in 1992 (Anderson, 1992) and guidelines on using the codes were made available (Anderson, et al., 1993). In general the code focused on contributing to society (clause 1.1) while avoiding harm to others (clause 1.2) and being fair (clause 1.4), honest and trustworthy (clause 1.5). More specifically, the ACM code also focused on professionals behaviours. As an example advising them to achieve the highest quality in an effectiveness way (clause 2.1), or asking them to honour their contracts and agreements (clause 2.6). Organisations were also considered within the code where for example they were advised to encourage the full acceptance of the codes and the responsibilities to their members (clause 3.1) (Anderson, 1992). To focus more on the identification of moral and ethical challenges for an IS developer, in this study we looked at Zühlke Engineering (www.zuehlke.com), a corporation that gained experience through participation in a variety of projects across different industries, but mostly focuses on development of critical systems for industries. We performed our investigation through the lens of a developer, a client and a user who were involved in production or use of software developed by Zühlke Engineering. Interviews were conducted including a set of questions focusing on the identification of empirical and moral challenges that are faced by an IS Developer. The questions aimed at understanding challenges that were observed in the process of development. The interview showed that most of the identified difficulties point to timeframes and professional attitude. Suggestions were also made that in order to provide a secure and safe final product, clients and developers should be informed about relevant ethical issues in advance. Different opinions were also observed where interviewees had difficulties on defining the person who should be ethically responsibility for the final product.

International Journal of Innovative Research in Computer Science & Technology, 2020

Gone are the days when "Might is Right", the law of Jungle use to prevail everywhere, though it still exists but to a much lesser degree. This means that the people & nations have understood their duties & right towards others in the current information or precisely the media age. This would not have come to the existence in the absence of the revolutionary nature of the computer evolution (encompassing almost all the disciplines of life) either Relativism or Emotivism paradigm. In my opinion Ethics is" Acknowledgement of others rights (whosoever & whatsoever) is directly or indirectly related to you & discharging your duties and responsibilities to them to the utmost satisfaction of your inner self. " This research based on the lifelong (twenty eight years) teaching the software Engineering as a computer discipline has envisioned the researcher to attribute software Engineering as a character in the light of the various ethical and moral considerations , theory and Practices.

Communications of the ACM, 1997

World Applied Sciences Journal

Software engineering techniques and tools are required to develop or build any computer-based applications. The task of developing Software applications is a complex, expensive and ethical engineering which requires qualified software engineering professionally and ethically. Studies and literature denoted that software engineering professionals still facing problems concerning ethical aspects. Analysis shows that Islamic sources (Holy Qur’an and Sunnah) are the highest standard ethical principles for building individual, communities and Ummah (nation) levels. Islamic ethics are universal, stable, comprehensive, fair and standard which are suitable for all nations and times; and when followed leads to create an ethically great society. To effectively solve ethical problem in computer and software engineering field; we propose a new model, which mainly based on integrating an Islamic based solution to solve ethical related problems. This paper focuses on adopting new Ethical Based Ma...