Human Values in Software Release Planning

TL;DR

This paper introduces an Integer Programming model that incorporates human values like privacy and fairness into software release planning, aiming to balance economic and ethical considerations in requirement selection.

Contribution

It presents a novel ILP approach using fuzzy graph algebra to explicitly include human values in software release decisions, addressing a gap in traditional planning methods.

Findings

The ILP model effectively balances requirements based on human values.

Incorporating human values reduces potential ethical breaches.

The approach improves decision-making in software release planning.

Abstract

Software products have become an integral part of human lives, and therefore need to account for human values such as privacy, fairness, and equality. Ignoring human values in software development leads to biases and violations of human values: racial biases in recidivism assessment and facial recognition software are well-known examples of such issues. One of the most critical steps in software development is Software Release Planning (SRP), where decisions are made about the presence or absence of the requirements (features) in the software. Such decisions are primarily guided by the economic value of the requirements, ignoring their impacts on a broader range of human values. That may result in ignoring (selecting) requirements that positively (negatively) impact human values, increasing the risk of value breaches in the software. To address this, we have proposed an Integer Programming approach to considering human values in software release planning. In this regard, an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) model has been proposed, that explicitly accounts for human values in finding an "optimal" subset of the requirements. The ILP model exploits the algebraic structure of fuzzy graphs to capture dependencies and conflicts among the values of the requirements.