Destiny by Software
By: Anastasia Stanislawa Malicka
The application of software is now exceeding its usual purpose to improve business and government operations. It is now spreading quickly into our everyday life and applications, from dictating our daily routines to specifying our diet to qualifying us for type of employment and even selection of our future partners, based on our genetic compatibility.
This is not a recent phenomena. It's been practices over the past millennia with more recently accelerations driven by social media and genome projects. The idea of having software improve our livelihood is attractive to all of us, driven by objectivity and equality, promising to result in better quality of life for everyone.
As I reviewed the design of software and their quality metrics, I have realized that nowhere in the software design it includes any human outcomes. What I refer to as human outcomes, are the following metrics:
- Have our quality of life improved over the past 20 years?
- Did our population became more healthy in the same period of time?
- Did we improve employment situation of our population?
- Did we and our families prospered in that period of time?
- Have we eliminated conflicts in our families, our communities and nations?
- Did our government systems improved?
The answers to the above are obvious. It seems that there is a great opportunity to revisit our software quality metrics before we lose our ability to control our own lives and the lives of other people.
Technology is just a tool.
It needs to be managed with great responsibility.
Source: J. P. Miguel, D. Mauricio, G. Rodríguez. A review of software quality models for the evaluation of software products. International Journal of Software Engineering & Applications (IJSEA), Vol.5, No.6, November 2014. https://www.academia.edu/40436563/Most_Cited_Article_in_year_of_2014_International_Journal_of_Software_Engineering_and_Applications_IJSEA_?email_work_card=minimal-title