Featured Columns develop and manage these systems for a dependent public. If for whatever reason, those smart people make unethical decisions, bad things can happen on a wide scale. So our dilemma as computer science professors training future IT professionals boils down to this - we can stop educating smart people and start turning out dumb IT professionals. Or we as a society could decide to stop developing all new powerful technologies due to the potential for harm. Since neither of these two alternatives is feasible or probable, then we are left with a third alternative. We simply must put a stronger emphasis on training ETHICAL computer professionals. Ethics training must be infused in all of our CS courses starting with CS 1 and ending with the capstone senior design project. It is no longer an option if CS is to call itself a profession and turn out competent, trustworthy IT professionals. We are providing our students with highly specialized knowledge about a technology that pervades society and will involve decision-making on their part with far-reaching consequences for public good or harm. We need to prepare them for the reality that as practicing IT professionals, they are more apt to get into trouble as a result of a failure to properly anticipate and handle ethical problems rather than as a result of technical mistakes! We need to remember the lessons from Chernobyl, that the modern recipe for disaster includes highly intelligent IT professionals who are in control of advanced technologies and make unethical decisions. Chernobyl was not an accident nor a technical failure, but an ethical failure in which a powerful technology magnified the results of bad decisions. In the end the humans lost control of the technology causing disastrous consequences. We need to make sure through our education and training that our profession never has to face a digital Chernobyl. Taking the High Road Lessons from Chernobyl for IT C. Dianne Martin I n 1986 I went to the former Soviet Union for the first time. As it happened it was just three months after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. I recall bringing a suitcase full of tuna fish, Spam (the old kind!) and crackers with me due to concerns about the safety of the food supply. I encountered many Russians who were similarly concerned - young mothers who were afraid to give their children milk and many who did not trust the safety of fruits and vegetables grown in the Ukraine region. However, since that time what I have found out about the Chernobyl disaster is even more disturbing and represents a real object lesson for the IT profession. What was the true story behind Chernobyl, the greatest technological disaster in human history? It was a disaster that left at least 50 people immediately dead, affected the health of 50,000 people for years to come, turned 100 square miles of prime farmland into a wasteland for at least a millennium, and created a nuclear cloud that circled the globe producing radioactive fallout over all areas that it passed. The dirty secret about Chernobyl that unfolded as nuclear experts from around the world arrived on the scene to provide help was this. The Chernobyl disaster was not an accident, but an experiment! It was caused by Soviet scientists who, at the urging of political leaders, wanted to test the limits of the system. Western experts arriving on the scene found safety switches with duct tape over them to prevent them from being moved. There were stories of guns being held to the heads of technicians to stop them from shutting the system down when they received the warning signals as the system approached a meltdown state. The technology did not fail, but the human ethics did! As we consider what lesson the IT field can learn from this terrible disaster, we need to consider what was involved. What was the recipe for this disaster? The first ingredient was a powerful technology with the potential to cause great harm to many people. The next ingredients were the smart people who understood the technology and upon whom the public relied for their expertise to manage the powerful technology. The final ingredients were the set of unethical decisions made that unleashed the powerful technology to cause great harm. We can see a similar potential for disaster from computing technologies. We have very powerful technologies with potential to cause great harm to many people. Computer technologies misused could cause harm to medical systems, financial systems, public safety systems, transportation systems, the list goes on. We have very smart people who Thinking Professionally UML and Agile Methods: In Support of Irresponsible Development Don Gotterbarn he principles of good software development are improving. We have better answers today about how to develop more effective software then we did yesterday. We may not have complete answers about how to produce quality software but we are getting closer. Two significant advances in the past few years are the Unified Modeling Language (UML), both the notation and its associated process(RUP) and the agile software development model in all Volume 36, Number 2, 2004 June T inroads – The SIGCSE Bulletin

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