About Integrating Ethics in The Software Engineering Curriculum

Professionalism and accountability, intellectual property rights, privacy and information protection, and a variety of other ethical dilemmas are an integral part of the software engineer’s eventual career. The software engineering community has therefore recognized the importance of building a culture of software engineering ethics to guide the behaviour of and decisions made by professional software engineers to ensure, as much as possible, that their efforts will be used to make software engineering a beneficial and respected profession. However, the lack of consensus regarding the teaching methodology, the tensions that arise when adhering to different social or legal standards, and sometimes the lack of interest and experience, hinders the effective integration of ethics in the academic programmes. This article discusses these challenges, and presents some approaches to teach the software engineering ethics.