Legal and Ethical Dimensions of Software Development: A Report

This report addresses legal and ethical considerations within software development, focusing on a scenario involving a new software product and its stakeholders, including owners, consumers, and employees. It examines the impact of potential actions on these stakeholders, referencing the ACM code of ethics to justify decisions. The report also analyzes the factors that contributed to the failure of the Denver Airport Baggage system, such as lack of documentation, unrealistic expectations, poor planning, and lack of motivation. Furthermore, it proposes professional techniques for increasing reliability and safety in software development, including software engineering responsibility, improved user interfaces, experimentation, and redundancy with self-checking mechanisms. This document is available on Desklib, where students can find a wealth of solved assignments and past papers.

LEGAL AND ETHICAL ISSUES
Student Name
Professor’s Name
Date

QUESTION 2
From this scenario, stakeholders include owners, consumers, and employees among others.
According to the ACM code, action can be taken to these stakeholders and this results in both
negative and positive consequences. Concerning employees, the ACM code demands that, they
should be accorded respect, given a rightful pay, appreciated given truthful communication. This
gives them motivation and at the end they will work to produce proper systems. Consumers on
the other hand, should be provided with high quality software that don’t fail each and every time.
The ACM also demands that, customers should also be given ethical products and customer care
services to be availed, this is according to section 1 of the ACM code. This will attract more
customers hence increasing the number of software users. Owners also should like well when it
comes to profitability, longevity, market share, market standing, raising capital, social goals and
succession planning. When all this are done in the right way, the company will experience rapid
expansion.
QUESTION 3
The following are some the factors that led to the failure of Denver Airport Baggage
system:
Lack of scope documentation. For the well-functioning of the system, a detailed documentation
should be provided so as to help employees understand what they should do so as to achieve the
set objective. Lack of enough and relevant documentation makes the employees miss some
information.
Unrealistic expectations. Placing too much expectations on employees will reduce the
efficiency of the software such that one will work to complete it within a limited period of time.
Therefore, employees of system software should be given more time to produce a functional
software. In this scenario, employees are given less time as it’s evident that they only have two
months to test and fix problems before the launch.

Poor planning. Poor planning is as a result of limited time. Of the employee for this company
works for long hours and that causes them to develop fatigue and this interferes with the whole
process.
Lack of motivation. Employees are not motivated since they work for long hours only to be
paid low amounts when the top development team share profit.
Professional techniques for increasing reliability and safety
1. Software engineering and professional responsibility. This can be done by;
Bettering design, specifications, experimentation and documentation of the software.
Strengthening of the software engineer techniques on safety of important applications.
Careful organization and good management.
Honest communication among stakeholders including the development company, the company
and consumers.
2. Use interfaces and human factors. This prevent system failure by;
Being in position to expect potential errors and offsetting them with proper steps.
Consumer interfaces should be able to provide precise and orderly guidelines and error
messages.
The user interface must not contradict.
3. Experimentation
During experimentation, a test is done to ensure that the software is functioning and incase of
any error, it should be corrected before the software gets into the market.
4. Superfluity and self-checking
This technique provides duplication of components in case of system failure therefore this
provides continuity when the software is in use. Self-checking technique helps in detection of
mistakes for immediate action.