2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

As the exponential pace of technology continues to escalate, sadly so has technical debt and its counterpart ethical debt. This paper describes these persistent issues which negatively affect societies at a global level, with a focus upon software engineering design methods to expose and prevent these harmful debts early in the development lifecycle. As the users of software technologies are consequentially affected, social constructs are proposed to provide a feedback loop to both the developer and the consumer communities to better ensure continuous acceptable technical and ethical product quality. A historical review of technical and ethical debt concerns and their relationship is provided, with a focus upon the continuous tension between design rigor and time to market pressures. In terms of impacts, runaway modern day technical debt damages have been estimated at over $2.41 trillion. A recent example was a major global Automotive firm that had a large recall due to a safety related software problem in its cars. The cars were recalled and software updated at great expense, only to realize that the replacement software had not fixed the original problem and had new flaws. Clearly software industry investments to help prevent this type of phenomenon should pay substantial dividends.
The need for a more disciplined, engineering approach to identify and balance (e.g., tradeoff) technical and ethical attributes has been lamented. The proficient application of advanced design quality verification methodologies has shown to improve design quality and thus improved product performance for prioritized qualities. Including ethical quality attributes into the design verification process can reduce the probability of both technical and ethical debt. Software development tool sets can be leveraged to assist in the effectiveness and efficiency of this approach. These design methodologies should be strongly incorporated in education processes, software design guidelines and standards. Lastly the software development and user communities need to better organize awareness of this technology blight. The consumer community, independent agencies and government bodies can mount efforts to put a public spotlight upon these forms of software capability development malpractice resulting the mass distribution of harmful digital products.