Modeling Work-Ethics Spread in Software Organizations Sandeep Athavale Tata Consultancy Services 54-B, Hadapsar Industrial Estate Pune, India 411013 91 20 6608 6436 athavale.sandeep@tcs.com Meghendra Singh Tata Consultancy Services 54-B, Hadapsar Industrial Estate Pune, India 411013 91 20 6608 6333 meghendra.singh@tcs.com ABSTRACT Most organizations – whether software or otherwise – have a statement of mission, a vision for the future, and values that help them get there. People, on the other hand, have a wide range of ideas, beliefs and objectives. How does one reconcile the two? Otherwise put: how do work practices and ethics that are important from an organizational standpoint get inculcated in employees? We propose a Human Behavior Change model and apply it to the context of ethics spread in software organizations. The model is founded upon an internal cost-reward function of individuals and transmission effect between people that contributes to the decision to change and comply with certain ethics and practices. We use Agent Based Modeling and Simulation (ABMS) technique to represent our model. We experiment with virtual teams and create various scenarios to understand ethic spread. Although our larger aim is to model behavior change, in this early stage of our work, we build models to know how ethics spread through change in compliance behavior. We base our study on existing literature, a limited survey, some assumptions and simulation. Through simulation, we also seek to ask associated questions related to team size and compliance, spread of counter-ethics, message mechanism and speed of spread and the ‘mean time to change’ for different types of individuals. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.2.9 [Management]: Programming teams; K.6.1 [Project and People Management]; K.6.3 [Software Management]; K.7.4 [Computing Profession]: Professional Ethics; I.6 [Modeling and Simulation] General Terms Management, Measurement, Performance, Design, Experimentation, Human Factors. Keywords Human Aspects, Human Behavior Modeling, Behavior Change, Agent Based Simulation, Work Ethics, Ethic spread, Ethics Compliance, Cost-Reward function 1. INTRODUCTION Software engineering organizations (like any other organizations) have preferences for people complying with certain work practices and ethics for better quality of work, which they believe represent better professional conduct and lead to better customer satisfaction. Apart from ‘professional conduct’ ethics such as coming to work on time, respecting your co-workers opinions, sharing credit, or not using office time for personal work, there are specific work practices for software organizations such as code reviews, code back up and use of coding standards. Organizations use various techniques including training, message broadcasts and checklists, amongst other things, to inculcate these work ethics. However, there is often limited success in making people internalize such ethics, as indicated by a head of quality group in a large Indian software services organization, in our interview. In the interview we asked which human aspect would contribute most to the quality outcomes. The response was ‘internalization of desired work practices by the teams’. The management would want to know ways in which people will internalize ethical behavior. For example why is it difficult to inculcate the ethic of self-review of code across the board? Is it due to aspects such as time crunch or lack of appreciation of its impact or lack of effective messaging? We propose ethic spread as a two-part problem - one of effective transmission so that there is ‘awareness’ and second of internalization so that there is ‘compliance’ of the ethic. Internalization is the extent to which an ethic is accepted and, consequently, the desired behavior displayed and implicitly or explicitly communicated outward. The novelty is in our approach/model of ‘human behavior change’. The behavior change driven by inherent traits of human beings, such as influential personality, the method of transmission, whether it is observation or explicit messaging and the inherent valuation function which determines whether individuals will changeover (and increase or decrease compliance to certain ethic). We studied existing work on how norms or culture spreads in a community. We started by drawing upon references such as ACM software engineering code of ethics [1] to know the spectrum of ethics that are of relevance to the software industry. We then conducted a limited survey to identify certain aspects about prevalent ethics and asked how they got internalized. We also referred certain functions of decision making such as the cost- reward function from social psychology. We then created a prototype of our model to study various scenarios. Although it would be interesting, this study does not focus on the differences in practices in software organizations vis-à-vis non software organizations and also does not distinguish between ethics and practices. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. 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