Human Values in Requirements Engineering : RE’21 Tutorial

Abstract

Recent years has seen renewed interest in the social impact of technology, as major scandals such as Cambridge Analytica and bias in AI systems have made the international press. There is an increasing acceptance that software systems must properly embed human values - such as inclusion, diversity, social responsibility, and cultural context - in their design. The software engineering field, however, has been slow to adopt human-value based methods for software design, in contrast to other fields such as Human Computer Interaction. In this tutorial, we gave an overview of approaches for embedding human values in technology, summarizing work in other fields. We then described work in addressing human values in the software engineering field, with a specific focus on requirements engineering. Through a series of interactive exercises, we helped participants to explore what human values mean in a requirements engineering context, how they can be captured as part of requirements engineering, and practical steps that can be taken to address human values in software.