Journal of Theoretical and Applied Information Technology
15
th
April 2017. Vol.95. No 7
© 2005 – ongoing JATIT & LLS
ISSN: 1992-8645 www.jatit.org E-ISSN: 1817-3195
1405
LINKING SOFTWARE ENGINEERING PARADIGMS TO
ISLAMIC VALUES
1
BURHAN UL ISLAM KHAN,
2
BISMA RASOOL,
3
M. MUEEN UL ISLAM MATTOO,
4
AJAZ
AHMAD HURRAH,
5
BINYAMIN ADENIYI AJAYI,
6
RASHIDAH F. OLANREWAJU
1,3,6
Department of ECE, Kulliyyah of Engineering, IIUM, Gombak, Malaysia
2
Department of IT, Central University of Kashmir, India
4
Department of CSE, School of Technology, IUST, Kashmir, India
5
Department of Information Systems, Kulliyyah of ICT, IIUM, Gombak, Malaysia
E-mail:
1
burhan.iium@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
In general, Muslims all over the world have an innate tendency to hold fast to Islam’s teachings as narrated
in the Qur’an and Hadith. The present study is an investigation on the utilization of this adherence for
improving the standards of ethical behavior of Muslim IT professionals, particularly software engineers.
The principal point of this paper is to develop the importance of ethics among software engineers in order
to make them realize the impact of various immoral practices in their field e.g., property violations, general
software upgrading, design methodology, software privacy, etc. The moral values put forward in code-of-
conduct have been scrutinized from Islamic point of view by studying the same in light of verses in the
Qur’an and Hadith of our beloved Prophet Muhammad (P.B.U.H.). It is high time for software engineers
and developers to accept the dire need of a paradigm shift in software engineering that integrates divine
revelation with reason. The paper, therefore, has an Islamic but global approach towards software
engineering paradigms.
Keywords: Code of Ethics, Ethical Issues, Information Ethics, Islamic Ethics, Software Engineering Ethics
1. INTRODUCTION
In today’s world, computers assume a basic and
important part in trade, industry, research,
communication frameworks, medicine,
entertainment, education and numerous different
domains of our civilization. Experts and
professionals who are involved towards
contribution in improvement, designing,
specification, analysis, maintenance, certification,
study or hordes of various other uses of computer
frameworks have a huge effect on our society and
in this manner, there are chances towards making
positive offerings to the general public, but
simultaneously there is a possibility to bring about
trouble. To guarantee that their endeavors will be
utilized for good, software engineers must confer
upon themselves to make the discipline of software
engineering gainful and a profession of high regard
and respect, which will promote a moral way to
deal with the expert practice. Strong professional
ethical issues have been underlined as emphatically
proficient, by the Computing Curricula 2001, The
Joint Task Force on Computing Curricula of IEEE
Computer Society and Association for Computing
Machinery (ACM) [1] thus making it a constituent
of the main subject matter for computing [2].
Ground-breaking improvements in the mid
1940s, in the fields of science and reasoning,
prompted the formation of another branch of morals
that would eventually be named as “information
ethics” or “computer ethics”. The originator of this
new field of philosophy was the American
researcher Norbert Wiener, a teacher of engineering
and mathematics at MIT [3]. Walter Maner
characterized the planned new field as one that
reviews moral issues “exasperated, changed or
made by innovations in computer technology” [4].
He built up an exploratory course related to
computer ethics planned fundamentally for students
in university-level software engineering programs.
Johnson noticed that computers put forward new
forms of standard ethical issues and ethical
predicaments, fueling the old issues, and driving us
to apply common good standards in unknown