Informing Science InSITE- “Where Parallels Intersect ” June 2003 Is it Ethical to Log Use.pdf

Informing Science InSITE - “Where Parallels Intersect” June 2003 Is it Ethical to Log Users’ Actions in Software Engineering Experiments? Amela Karahasanovic Simula Research Laboratory, Lysaker, Norway amela@simula.no Abstract In recent years, there has been a significant increase in the number of empirical studies in software engi- neering that involve human participants. Such studies have heightened the need for considering ethical issues. Researchers have not only moral, but also pragmatic, reasons for treating participants in their studies ethically. They want to maintain their access to the data source and to get funding for their re- search. Thus, the researchers need to be aware of both ethical issues in general, and those that are spe- cific to a particular research practice. This paper briefly describes our experiences with a tool that logs all actions of the users/participants (commands, keystrokes and mouse movements), and collects their comments on a web-based screen. The tool was used in two usability studies and raised ethical issues concerning the assurance of confi- dentiality and minimization of inconvenience. The paper also discusses a conflict that appeared during these studies, between ethical standards and the ensuring of experimental validity. Keywords : ethics, experiment, empirical software engineering, logging Introduction The term ‘ethics’ denotes here the standard for moral behavior of a particular group, such as “the ethics of physicians” or “the ethics of engineers” (O, 2001). Considering ethical issues is an im- portant part of the planning and conducting of empirical studies in software engineer