Meet your Maker: A Social Identity Analysis of Robotics Software Engineering

Abstract

Software systems often reflect the values of the people that engineered them: it is vital to understand and engineer those values systematically. This is crucial for autonomous systems, where human interventions are not always possible. The software engineering community shows some positive values —like altruism— and lack others —like diversity. In this project, we propose to elicit the values of the engineers of autonomous systems by analysing the artefacts they produce. We propose to build on the social identity theory to identify encouraged and discouraged behaviours within this collective. Our goal is to understand, diagnose, and improve the engineering culture behind autonomous system development.