Do You Own a Volkswagen? Values as Non-Functional Requirements
Of late, there has been renewed interest in determining the role and relative importance of (moral) values in the design of software and its acceptance. Events such as the Snowden revelations and the more recent case of the Volkswagen “defeat device” soft
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Values are a key driver of human behaviour and are seen as an important component in societal and environmental sustainability. However, current software engineering practice does not pay sufficient attention to the notion of values given the role of software and systems in so-called “smart city” sustainability actions. Critically, there is no sufficiently expressive machinery to describe how values such privacy and security are elicited, negotiated, mediated and accommodated in systems design beyond either early stages such as contextual design. For the purposes of this paper, values are what Friedman refers to: ownership and property; privacy, freedom from bias, universal usability, trust, autonomy, informed consent and identity. She defines values as: what a person or group of people consider important in life [13]. The paper’s position is motivated by the recent so-called “Dieselgate” media story concerning Volkswagen. On 18th September 2015, Volkswagen, USA was accused by the US Environment Protection Agency (EPA) of installing an illegal “defeat device” software that dramatically reduces nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions - but only when the cars were undergoing strict emission tests. This paper advances the notion that (moral) values are distinct from non functional requirements or even softgoals as in goal oriented requirements engineering (GORE) approaches but can benefit from being incorporated into NonFunctional Requirements (NFR) frameworks. In order to present this position, c IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2016 Published by Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. All Rights Reserved C. Bogdan et al. (Eds.): HCSE 2016/HESSD 2016, LNCS 9856, pp. 151–162, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-44902-9 10
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the paper takes a case example approach. Firstly, a summary outlining the key issues arising from the Volkswagen “defeat device” is presented in Sect. 2. The case example is analysed with respect to value concerns. In contrast to other recent analyses of the Volkswagen case [29], the paper augments the analysis by taking concrete views from developers. Evidence is drawn from the Reddit discussion forum section on Coding where developers posted 80 items over a four day period [25]. Section 3 presents this analysis. In doing so, this paper concretely proposes how an existing classification mechanism for requirements can be extended. Section 4 draws on the academic literature on values, ethics and non functional requirements to provide further support for the proposition that values can be classified as a special case of non-functional requirement. In Sect. 5, the paper concludes by offering a roadmap for further research.
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Case Study and Approach
Interpretative, exploratory case study research is a first step to understanding phenomena as input for further research. The Volkswagen case study is important from two perspectives: Firstly, its impact on environmental pollution and secondly, the subsequent apportioning of blame on software engineers responsible for t
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