Are your engineering and technology ecosystems ethical?

There has been a fantastic movement over the past few years, with many of us taking more notice of supply chain ethics and our collective responsibilities as humans. At home we are more considerate around our use of packaging and plastics, our cars are becoming more eco-friendly (supposedly), our food and clothes come with Fairtrade stamps, and our workplaces shout about how diverse they are and how much money and support they give to charity.

However, there is an important part of our lives that we are ignoring, an everyday aspect that feels far away from our end user experiences. This area is; 'how ethically is our software developed...'

Software is arguably one of the most important things in our modern world. Without it, many would struggle to survive – literally. Yet we seem to be completely ignorant when it comes to the ethics involved in how that software was developed and delivered to us.

When we download the latest apps, watch the latest viral on-demand series and create our IOT homes, have we thought about what is required to deliver this to us? If we did, I think we would be shocked.

Despite what many of the general public think, not all tech companies encourage their employees to ride scooters around the office or provide free sweets. Many have complex technology supply chains that involve multiple suppliers in multiple regions who in turn have multiple suppliers and so on. If you delve into the detail you will most likely find that there will be many suppliers who have less than favourable working conditions, i.e. developers who are forced to work for longer periods than the body allows for, some who have 'connections' to 'things' that most wouldn't like to broadcast, and some suppliers who are just bad.

I assume your company is fine as the RFP process highlighted that the company you awarded the ￡multi-million contract with has a very big CSR presence and they obviously care, don't they?

In my experience, they do care but there isn't any mechanism to show that their tech supply chain cares too and so it is being ignored and therefore it most likely doesn't abide by the same rules.

Having discussed this with others within the software industry, there is an appetite for using engineering practices and data to better understand the ethics of our partners and suppliers and how they source and develop their software. The immediate step we can take to doing this is by enhancing the metrics we can pull from the e2e software delivery lifecycle.

For example:

The same individual has committed code over a 16hr period every day for 10 days; This highlights that 1. Some poor engineer is on the verge of having a breakdown, or 2. They are sharing a login...

At NTT DATA, our team will be exploring how we use DevOps practices, tooling and metrics to bring to life software engineering and technology ethics so we can bring transparency to everything that we and our clients adopt, build and run. We would love some participants for the research so if you're interested, contact me at [email protected]