Dead Sheepdog: Ethical Dilemmas and Agile Software Development
We all experience pressure to compromise our work and our reasonable care for others. As software becomes more beneficial, more pervasive, and inter-connected, our potential to harm grows.
Agile practices make a contribution to ethical practice but we can and should be doing more to help each other navigate the ethical dilemmas we face.
This open space session will frame professional ethics in context with agile values and engage participants in a conversation about how our day-to-day actions affect our employers, customers, peers, end users, and society.
“I compared the ScrumMaster to a sheepdog who would do anything to protect its flock, or team.” (from “Agile Project Management with Scrum” by Ken Schwaber)
A dead sheepdog can’t protect its flock.
The session will start with a short talk on ethics and its place in our professional context. We will introduce some concepts from the experiences of Roger Boisjoly on the NASA Shuttle Program (http://judykat.com/ken/2007/12/02/ethical-action-is-not-moral-certainty/), as an opening to an interactive discussion. Following our review of the Boisjoly Case Study, we will share some personal/professional experiences, to personalize the participants’ experience. We will then engage the audience in conversations around specific ethical dilemmas (including whether the CSM is unethical).
The session will be very interactive, with the co-presenters serving as both discussion leaders and facilitators/moderators. The conversation will be open and participatory. We will utilize some of the techniques from Open Space Technology, as documented by Harrison Owen in his book “Open Space Technology”, including engaging the participants in deciding what topics to cover.
Given our time constraints, the Open Space approach must be limited, but should serve to fully engage the participants and drive interesting subjects. As the conversations progress, each sub-group will be encouraged to identify a scribe who can record notes of their discussion and report back to the group as a whole. Those notes will be assembled by the presenters, and compiled into a report back to the community after the event.