Software project management is the collection of techniques used to develop and deliver various types of software products.

This developing discipline traditionally includes technical issues such as: the choice of software development methodology, how to estimate project size and schedule, how to ensure safety, what resources to reuse and which programming environment to use for the development.

The discipline also includes management issues such as: when to train personnel, what are the risks to the project success, and how to keep the project on schedule. These choices are then embodied in a software project management plan. Developing software is frequently complicated involving many people from different areas and with different skills, experiences and social attitudes. There are many operational decisions to be taken during this extended activity.

There are many different approaches to control the complexity of this activity which can be viewed at two levels. There are those approaches which are concerned with high level decisions and processes such as the Capability Maturity Model and the ISO 9000 series, and there are methods which deal with the details of the day to day activities of the project managers and software development teams. These latter methods include COCOMO, PRINCE and Function Point Analysis.

Relevant ethical principles must be established in order to identify the ethical issues associated with software project management. Ethics comprises both practice and reflection [van Luijk, 1994]. It is sufficient to consider only ethics practice in this paper because software project management is concerned primarily with action that guides others towards some common goal rather than conceptual reflection of the role and value of project management.

Step Description 1 Visualise what the goal is 2 Make a list of the jobs that need to be done 3 Ensure there is one leader 4 Assign people to jobs 5 Manage expectations, allow a margin of error and have a fallback position 6 Use an appropriate leadership style 7 Know what is going on 8 Tell people what is going on 9 Repeat Step 1 through 8 until Step 10 can be achieved 10 Realise the project goal Figure 2 The Ten Steps of Structured Project Management

The eight ethical principles can be used to provide an insight to how ethical management might be achieved. The activities within each of the ten steps of SPM have been analysed in order to identify the dominant ethical issues of each step [Rogerson, 1997]. The results of this analysis are shown in Figure 3 It is recognised that most of the eight ethical principles will have some impact on each step but it is important to identify those which will have a significant impact on each particular step

Step Principle 1. Honour 2. Honesty 3. Bias 4. Adequacy 5. Due care 6. Fairness 7. Social cost 8. Action Figure 3

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 X X X X X X XX X XXXX X X XX X X X X XX X X X X XX X XXX XX XX 6 2 4 5 4 4 1 5 2 4

Negative affects include both overt harm and the denial or reduction of goods. So obviously the development of a medical software package which delivered erroneous dosages of medicine that killed patients would have a negative effect; but we would also include as having a negative effect software which limited people's freedom of expression. Limitations on positive ethical values and rights are negative effects. It can also be argued that the failure to promote positive ethical values is also a negative effect.

Just as producing software of high quality should be second nature to the software engineer so should producing software that is ethically sensitive. Indeed there is clearly an overlap in these two requirements. The project management process for software development must accommodate an ethical perspective. The major criticism of current practice is that any ethical consideration tends to be implicit rather than explicit which has a tendency to devalue the importance of the ethical dimension. By using ethical principles, identifying of ethical hotspots and using SoDIS it is possible to ensure that the key ethical issues are properly addressed as an integral part of the software development process. Quite simply, project management should be guided by a sense of justice, a sense of equal distributions of benefits and burdens and a sense of equal opportunity. In this way software development project management will become ethically aligned.