Chapter 7. Building a Culture of Responsible Software Engineering
All the topics I’ve covered so far—mitigating bias, incorporating societal context, planning for unintended consequences, preserving privacy, reducing your code’s carbon footprint, and the rest—only matter if they’re put into practice.
If you want to implement responsible software engineering for your business, it’s a multipart challenge:
Setting policy
What kinds of responsible software engineering should you value and practice?
Spreading the word
How do you alert and educate coworkers, and what kinds of resistance might you meet?
Following responsible processes
What are best practices for bringing a product from idea to launch responsibly?
Creating incentives
How can you smooth the way for people to make responsible choices?
Learning from mistakes
How do you prevent errors of the past from being forgotten and repeated?
Measuring success
How can you know if you’re being responsible?
One important word you’ll see in this chapter is governance. It means setting up and enforcing a system of rules and processes within an organization. Responsible software engineering definitely benefits from strong governance, such as communicating the company’s responsible goals broadly, creating a responsible launch process for products, and establishing committees or panels for oversight.
In this chapter, ...
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