Ethics-Aware DecidArch Game: Designing a Game to Reflect on Ethical Considerations in Software Architecture Design Decision Making

Software systems are increasingly being employed in people’s lives and society. They can improve, but also negatively affect the quality of life and interfere with human rights by, e.g., undermining the individuals’ and society’s values and causing ethical issues. To prevent such issues, software architects need to take ethical considerations into account at the early stages of design, e.g., when making architecture design decisions. Such considerations regard stakeholders, ethical values and their relations, ethical concerns, and ethical decisions. Addressing ethical considerations is especially difficult for software architects because of (i) the lack of training in ethics and philosophy, (ii) the existence of inherent ambiguity in ethical values, and (iii) the lack of methodological support in dealing with ethical and social implications of software systems, and eliciting and operationalizing ethical values.In this emerging results paper, we propose a card-based game (called Ethics-Aware DecidArch), helping software architects reflect on ethical considerations. Initial results on the effect of our game, are collected in four game sessions. Results show that the game helped software architects (i) reflect on different solutions for resolving ethical concerns, (ii) make ethical decisions along with providing reasons behind such decisions, and (iii) reflect on the operationalization of ethical values and their trade-offs.