Thursday 20 July 2023

UCC and Lero study seeks to understand responsible software engineering and development decisions; participants required for study into factors influencing responsible software engineering.

Software is ubiquitous, and debate about its benefits and harms rages. There is a growing call for responsible software engineering, yet research into the priorities for responsibility of software engineers and developers lags. Now, a team at Lero, the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Software and University College Cork, want to understand what influences responsible software engineering and development decisions.

Psychologist Dr Sarah Robinson, a senior postdoctoral researcher with Lero, is asking software engineers to take part in a 10-minute anonymised online survey to establish what issues and values developers believe software should address and embody.

“Software engineers play a huge role in designing the world in which we live, for better or for worse. We are interested in learning about software engineers’ experiences of designing and developing software. We want to see how we can learn from their experiences to build responsible software design and engineering processes that will help shape a more just, inclusive, fair society and world,” said Dr Robinson.

“We want to understand what issues and values software engineers believe software should address and embody and we'd like to understand what ethical concerns you think should be prioritised in responsible software engineering. This survey is part of the first phase of a larger research project on responsible software engineering and your participation in this survey will help guide our first steps.” 

Participate in this short survey.