IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2022 - 87

reasoning map poorly to refinements in functionality.
User stories contain context but are always
focused on functionality-and only certain people
get to write the stories. Students are asked to eliminate
" noise " in agile iteration, but that same " noise "
may be crucial in ethical considerations. Critical ethical
inquiry is disruptive at its core and does not sit
well with a process of incremental refinement.
Student experiences
We include some illustrative (but admittedly anecdotal)
snapshots of student engagement in critical
ethical analysis. We plan to conduct a more thorough
qualitative analysis of student work in the near future.
In Charles's class, students studied the U.S. Census
Bureau's decision to use differential privacy in the
2020 Census [26]. They employed the ethical cycle
to address the moral questions at the heart of this
issue, meeting and discussing their findings with one
another in small rotating groups at each iteration.
The journals of their ethical investigations reveal the
power of iterative reflection with fellow students. For
instance, one student starts with an underdeveloped
stakeholder analysis:
Figure 3. Schwaber and Beedle's [25]
book on Scrum.
and people. If the product requirements are well
known and the engineers know exactly how to
build the requirements into a product using the
selected technology, there is very little noise of
unpredictability. The work proceeds linearly, in a
straight line, with no false starts, little rework, and
few mistakes " [25, p. 5].
Students experience the " flow " of separating concerns
and focusing on functionality when they do
Agile in project courses, and it tends to be a rewarding
experience for them. But this satisfying feeling of flow
does not transfer well to students engaging in the ethical
cycle, where new evidence or analysis can radically
shift perspectives on the moral problem at hand.
Ultimately, do the differences between critical
ethical inquiry and iterative development outweigh
the similarities? Does making a connection between
the two breeds a false familiarity? It is true that critical
ethical engagement, like Agile, is nonlinear,
and reflection and consideration of other perspectives
are honored in Agile. But iterations of ethical
September 2022
" At a base level, the U.S. government is very interested
in this data, as they will use it when considering
how to draw voting lines and give out funds
based on populations. The American people are
also an important stakeholder, as it is their data
that is being released in the census. Finally, any
research center/individual who uses this data is
a stakeholder, as they will want to make sure that
this data is as accurate as possible. "
At the subsequent group reflection, however, a
fellow student raises an important consideration:
"  discussed how the Census Bureau
should
communicate with
minority groups
who would be impacted the most by differential
privacy, as he had further researched and
found that, at least where the NCAI was concerned,
the bureau had done a poor job in their
communications. "
This new perspective clearly influences the development
in the second iteration:
" The Bureau has argued that it is their responsibility
to do everything they can to prevent specifically
the data that they collect from being
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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2022

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