Towards responsible software engineering: combining value-based processes, agile practices, and green metering

In contemporary software engineering, business value and end user requirements are the primary drivers for design decisions. Ethical values such as fairness and sustainability, a key concern in green software engineering, are complementary, non-technical drivers addressed by value-based systems engineering as, for instance, specified in IEEE Standard 7000. Such process-centric initiatives explain what should be done but not how to get there. Practitioners are assumed to be able and willing to locate documents such as codes of conduct; document study is required ("pull"). A proactive, lightweight integration into existing agile practices, providing tangible on-the-job advice for developers and other stakeholders, is missing ("push"). Our research agenda addresses this problem area. Following a proactive approach, we propose to combine existing work to ease access to and consumption of ethical and green design knowledge for a world in which software systems are increasingly no longer passive tools for users but make autonomous decisions affecting human lives and the planet. In this short paper, we report on a completed and two emerging projects in this topic area in terms of their goals, preliminary results, and envisioned future work.