Empirical Software Engineering Research Ethics

Abstract

Software engineering - unlike other empirical fields such as psychology, medicine, anthropology - has yet to address ethical principles and their application to data collection and analysis. This pane1 will explore ethical issues, in particular, with regards to metrics and their use.Ethical issues are important to researchers for several reasons. First, within the U.S. and Canada, researchers receiving federal grants for their research are required to follow ethical principles regarding informed consent, confidentiality, and minimization of harm. Research grants can be canceled for non-compliance to ethical standards. In rare cases, funding to an entire department can be at risk, as was recently the case for Duke University's Medical School.Another important issue to researchers has to do with ethical codes and their creation. In Canada, a joint council has recently created a new ethical code to be used in assessing research from several major granting councils (including those that would be responsible for software engineering research). Because this code was not created with software engineering research in mind, it might not conform to how software engineers view ethics. Yet it will still be applied to software engineering proposals. Therefore, as researchers, it is important to be proactive in both defining ethics as regards metrics and ensuring compliance to those standards. Without this proactive voice, ethical standards that do not make sense might be imposed upon the community. With software engineering research's close ties to industry and its products, it is not clear how traditional standards should be applied or modified to fit current practices.Industrial leaders should be concerned about ethics as well. Ethical reasoning supplies the basis for law. Therefore, industrial representatives need to ensure that the research that occurs in their environments follows ethical codes in order to protect themselves from litigation. Knowledge of ethics or ethical codes also informs industrial representatives about their rights with respect to the research content, such as how the data will be used, how it will be stored, and who will have access to it. Awareness of these rights is critical in today's competitive environment, especially with regard to university policies. For instance, in the U.S., OMB Circular A-110 - currently under review, requires all data collected with federal research monies to be made publicly available. Industries that have a stake in university research would be well advised to understand and address policies such as this.In the end, though, good ethics makes for good research. It therefore behooves us, as researchers and users of research, to understand issues regarding an ethical approach to metrics research. This panel will address informed consent, data sharing, confidentiality, analysis, access, and other important ethical issues.