Legal is not the same as right
A company can use a tool to find out which customers are sad, and then sell them more things.
It may be legal. Is it right?
Laws say what you must not do. Ethics is about what you should do. In this lesson you think about both, and you meet two standards that help developers do good work.
Key words
| Word | What it means | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Ethics | Ideas about what is right and wrong. | do not trick users |
| Code of conduct | A written list of how members of a group must behave. | the code of a professional body |
| Professional practice | Working in a careful, honest and skilled way. | testing before release |
| Open source | Software whose code anyone can read, and often use and change. | a free library |
| Licence | Permission, with rules, to use something that somebody else made. | MIT licence |
| Inclusion | Making sure everyone can take part and be treated fairly. | software for people with different needs |
| Standard | An agreed way of doing something, written down so that many people can follow it. | ISO 90003, W3C rules for the web |
| Accessibility | Making software usable by people with different needs. | a text description of each picture |
| Bias | Unfair treatment that favours some people or goes against others. | a tool that works worse for some faces |
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Dilemmas: what would you do?
Have a go
Dilemmas: what would you do?
4 questionsYour answers are marked here and are not kept. A college account keeps every student’s marks.
Four ethics topics for developers
| Topic | The question | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Code of conduct | How must a professional behave? | Be honest, protect the public, respect privacy |
| Professional practice | Is the work careful and skilled? | Test, document, admit mistakes, keep learning |
| Software licensing | Are we allowed to use this code or tool? | Check the licence before you add a library |
| Inclusion and diversity | Can everyone use it, and was everyone thought of? | Different languages, abilities and backgrounds |
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Codes of conduct
Many professions have a code. For IT in the UK, the BCS (the Chartered Institute for IT) has one. It asks members to be honest, to care about public safety and privacy, and to keep learning new skills.
A company or a college often has its own code too.
Software licences in plain words
| Kind | What it allows | What you must do |
|---|---|---|
| Proprietary | Use it as the owner says, often for a fee | Do not copy or share it |
| Open source: permissive (for example MIT) | Use, change and share, even in a paid product | Keep the licence notice |
| Open source: copyleft (for example GPL) | Use, change and share | Share your changes under the same licence |
| No licence at all | Nothing. The owner keeps all rights | Ask first |
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Two standards you should know
ISO/IEC/IEEE 90003:2018 is a guide. It helps software teams use the general quality rules of ISO 9001 in their own work.
W3C is the group that writes the standards for the web: HTML, CSS and accessibility rules called WCAG (the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). A standard helps different products work together and makes quality easier to check.