Supporting Value-Aware Software Engineering Through Traceability and Value Tactics

Paper in proceeding, 2025

Understanding human values like honesty, security, power, and fairness is crucial for designing trustworthy software systems. Recently, the software engineering community has recognized the importance of considering human values when developing software systems. However, there is no mature approach to considering human values as a first-order concern in software engineering. The exact meaning of such values is often vague or unclear, which makes it difficult to treat them systematically and break them down into traceable requirements, implementation, and testing artifacts. In this vision paper, we propose a systematic approach to seamlessly integrate human values into the requirements engineering process. Concretely, we introduce the concept of “value tactics”, which are tangible design decisions crafted to uphold certain values explicitly. We illustrate the approach with a running example and conclude with a research agenda for advancing value-aware software engineering.