Ethics and Professionalism

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The clients, course instructors, and students must make an extra special effort to work together and keep the project on track.  Part of this extra special effort will depend on the professional behavior of everyone and the adherence to ethics as might be specified for professional engineers.

Everyone is invited to take advantage of the links below to learn more about professionalism and ethics.

• Software Engineering Ethics Research Institute
• Murdough Center for Engineering Professionalism
• National Society of Professional Engineers
• 3M Interact Meeting Advisor
• Team Building News

Although major issues of professionalism and ethics are unlikely to occur among all project participants, smaller problems may occur.  It is hoped that all parties will be considerate of each other and will focus on solving the problem rather than on making it larger.  It is hoped that all parties will remain in communication and will continue to work toward completing the project.  To help, a procedure is given in the Teamwork section to work out problems.

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Professional/Ethical Infractions

Infractions of professionalism or ethics by anyone involved in the project will be handled on a case-by-case basis, but may necessitate one or more of the following actions by the course instructor:

• Termination of the project
• Removal of the team member from the project

Examples of infractions include, but are not limited to:

1. Representing someone else's work as your own or hiding someone's lack of work (this would incur the severest penalty)
2. Adversely affecting team or team member grade/performance (poor performance, doing less work, doing too much work to the exclusion of others, inequitable utilization of team members, inappropriate evaluation of team members, ignoring course and project process guidelines)
3. Failing to communicate (withholding information, missing or arriving late to meetings, missing team presentations)
4. Uncooperative behavior (causing problems to grow larger, causing divisions, hiding infractions, being antagonistic, being disrespectful toward others)
5. Harming the client (divulging client secrets, intentionally introducing errors into the software, disrupting the client's workplace)

As stated above, however, infractions will be handled on a case-by-case basis.  It should also be noted that each team member is evaluated by his/her peers at the end of the project.

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