Senyeki Milton Marebane

Stakeholder analysis has become a crucial means for achieving software development ethical goals. This scoping review study aims to provide an overview of the extent to which stakeholder analysis has been applied to enhance ethics in software development. The study explores research studies that have been published by IEEE, ACM, Science Direct, AIS and Journal of Business Ethics. PRISMA-ScR was employed to achieve the objective of the study. Only six research studies published from 1999 to 2015 met the selection criteria for data extraction and analysis. The results show that the focus of stakeholder analysis is on moral impulse, risk identification, stakeholder interactions, stakeholder classification and impact level. Furthermore, stakeholder analysis for enhancing ethics in software development is prevalent to empower the voiceless stakeholders, risk management and stakeholder mapping and quantification for measuring stakeholder impact on projects. The analysis of the results reveals several research gaps such as unavailable empirical studies beyond 2015, concentration only on requirements engineering and lack of studies on stakeholder analysis on emergent technologies. The implications of this study point to the need for more guidance and expanded use of stakeholder analysis across the complete software process to benefit software teams and ongoing research to harness the potential of this theory on enhancing ethics in the emergent technologies.

Electricity theft comes with various disadvantages for power utilities, governments, businesses, and the general public. This continues despite the various solutions employed to detect and prevent it. Some of the disadvantages of electricity theft include revenue loss and load shedding, leading to a disruption in business operations. This study aimed to conduct a systematic literature review to identify what technology solutions have been offered to solve electricity theft and the effectiveness of those solutions by considering peer-reviewed empirical studies. The systematic literature review was undertaken following the guidelines for conducting a literature review in computer science to assess potential bias. A total of 11 journal articles published from 2012 to 2022 in SCOPUS, Science Direct, and Web of Science were analysed to reveal solutions, the type of theft addressed, and the success and limitations of the solutions. The findings show that the focus in research is channelled towards solving electricity theft in Smart Grids (SGs) and Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI); moreover, there is a neglect in the recent literature on finding solutions that can prevent electricity theft in countries that do not have SG and AMI installed. Although the results reported in this study are confined to the analysed research papers, the leading limitation in the selected studies, lack of real-life data for dishonest users. This study’s contribution is to show what technology solutions are prevalent in solving electricity theft in recent years and the effectiveness of such solutions.

Background: Issues of lack of consideration for professional responsibility by software engineers (SEs) present major challenges and concerns to software users. Previous studies on the subject of ethical responsibility in software development assessed whether software development key stakeholders should take ethical responsibility for their actions in software development. However, such studies focused on assessing responses from a particular grouping in software development. Objective: Based on the revelation, this study seeks to evaluate the perceived ethical responsibilities in software development by juxtaposing the perceptions of students, educators and industry-based software practitioners on the ethical responsibility of software development key stakeholders in South Africa. Methods: To meet this objective, the study collected data using a survey, which was shared on an online platform. A total of 561 (44 from computing academics; 103 from industry-based software practitioners and 414 from software development students) responses were received. The collected data were analysed using descriptive and variance statistical analysis approaches. Results: The study found that there is no significant statistical difference in how students, educators and software practitioners perceive the ethical responsibility of software development key stakeholders. Conclusions: This finding of the study shows that the prevailing view is that various software development key stakeholders should be held ethically responsible for their contribution to software development. Furthermore, the organisation of ethical responsibilities used in this study provides a useful framework to guide future studies on this subject.