Ethics is defined as “moral principles that govern a person’s behavior or the conducting of an activity.” Initially, I thought how could ethics relate to software engineering, I thought I would need to not press on the keys of my computer too hard to consider how my keyboard would feel or something along those lines. After finding out more ethics in software engineering would pertain to the impact of how your code would the people who would use it. If someone’s code had some kind of errors or mistakes the outcome would be devastating if the program was used for medical or engineering purposes. In essence, as software engineers, we are like a proxy for ethical issues our code could create.
In the case study “The code I’m still ashamed of” Bill Sourour was writing code for a pharmaceutical that was targeted towards teen girls that had the user take a test to figure what a specific drug to take from taking a quiz. But there was a catch, all the answers would point to a specific drug that the pharmaceutical company was producing. The drug’s main side effect was severe depression and suicidal thoughts. Bill found out that a girl killed her self due to the drug of the code he developed. He didn’t feel good about his code while in development and learning the news of that girl he definitely didn’t feel any better. If I was in his shoes I would like to think I would do the correct moral thing, but hindsight is 20/20.
My stance on the ethical implications of the quiz would be to report the outcome to my boss. If I was told to make the code and disregard this problem I would make the outcome of the quiz to be the drug that the company required, but I would put the effects and side-effects along with the result. I couldn’t turn away this problem because of the people the company would employ to make the quiz might not catch this ethical problem. I would just want the full scope of effects to be shown with the promotion of this drug.