Birgit Penzenstadler

A generic model for sustainability with process- and product-specific instances

Motivation: Software systems as we know them often have a economic purpose and/or fulfill human or social needs of their users. The economic purpose is analysed by economy itself; the latter goals are analysed in software engineering by user-centric techniques, such as service orientation. Yet, as software systems have an impact on the environment, environmental sustainability should be supported as a major goal for software development projects. Problem: Without applicable guidance, sustainability remains an untangible ideal. Therefore, we need a definition and a concrete decomposition of sustainability to relate it to software systems development. It is not sufficient to analyse environmental sustainbility on its own, but its interplay with other aspects in order to define appropriate actions and understand their effects. Principal idea: We analyse the dimensions of sustainability, their values with respective indicators, and activities to support them. These elements compose a conceptual model that allows for analysing and constructing actions both for a company or a product point of view. Contribution: We propose a generic sustainability model with instances for companies and projects from various case studies. We thus enable analysis, support and assessment of environmental sustainability in software engineering.

Sustainability in software engineering: A systematic literature review

Background: Supporting sustainability in software engineering is becoming an active area of research. We want to contribute the first Systematic Literature Review(SLR) in this field to aid researchers who are motivated to contribute to that topic by providing a body of knowledge as starting point, because we know from own experience, this search can be tedious and time consuming. Aim: We aim to provide an overview of different aspects of sustainability in software engineering research with regard to research activity, investigated topics, identified limitations, proposed approaches, used methods, available studies, and considered domains. Method: The applied method is a SLR in five reliable and commonly-used databases according to the (quasi-standard) protocol by Kitchenham et al. [1]. We assessed the 100 first results of each database ordered by relevance with respect to the search query. Results: Of 500 classified publications, we regard 96 as relevant for our research questions. We sketch a taxonomy of their topics and domains, and provide lists of used methods and proposed approaches. Most of the excluded publications were ruled out because of an unfitting usage of terms within the search query. Conclusions: Currently, there is little research coverage on the different aspects of sustainability in software engineering while other disciplines are already more active. Future work includes extending the study by reviewing a higher number of publications, including dedicated journal and workshop searches, and snowballing.

Sustainability design and software: the karlskrona manifesto

Sustainability has emerged as a broad concern for society. Many engineering disciplines have been grappling with challenges in how we sustain technical, social and ecological systems. In the software engineering community, for example, maintainability has been a concern for a long time. But too often, these issues are treated in isolation from one another. Misperceptions among practitioners and research communities persist, rooted in a lack of coherent understanding of sustainability, and how it relates to software systems research and practice. This article presents a cross-disciplinary initiative to create a common ground and a point of reference for the global community of research and practice in software and sustainability, to be used for effectively communicating key issues, goals, values and principles of sustainability design for software-intensive systems.The centrepiece of this effort is the Karlskrona Manifesto for Sustainability Design, a vehicle for a much needed conversation about sustainability within and beyond the software community, and an articulation of the fundamental principles underpinning design choices that affect sustainability. We describe the motivation for developing this manifesto, including some considerations of the genre of the manifesto as well as the dynamics of its creation. We illustrate the collaborative reflective writing process and present the current edition of the manifesto itself. We assess immediate implications and applications of the articulated principles, compare these to current practice, and suggest future steps.

Framing sustainability as a property of software quality

This framework addresses the environmental dimension of software performance, as applied here by a paper mill and a car-sharing service.

Towards a definition of sustainability in and for software engineering

Sustainability is not supported by traditional software engineering methods. This lack of support leads to inefficient efforts to address sustainability or complete omission of this important concept. Defining and developing adequate support requires a commonly accepted definition of what sustainability means in and for software engineering. We contribute a description of the aspects of sustainability in software engineering.

Systematic mapping study on software engineering for sustainability (SE4S)

Background/Context: The objective of achieving higher sustainability in our lifestyles by information and communication technology has lead to a plethora of research activities in related fields. Consequently, Software Engineering for Sustainability (SE4S) has developed as an active area of research. Objective/Aim: Though SE4S gained much attention over the past few years and has resulted in a number of contributions, there is only one rigorous survey of the field. We follow up on this systematic mapping study from 2012 with a more in-depth overview of the status of research, as most work has been conducted in the last 4 years. Method: The applied method is a systematic mapping study through which we investigate which contributions were made, which knowledge areas are most explored, and which research type facets have been used, to distill a common understanding of the state-of-the-art in SE4S. Results: We contribute an overview of current research topics and trends, and their distribution according to the research type facet and the application domains. Furthermore, we aggregate the topics into clusters and list proposed and used methods, frameworks, and tools. Conclusion: The research map shows that impact currently is limited to few knowledge areas and there is need for a future roadmap to fill the gaps.

Requirements: The Key to Sustainability

Softwares critical role in society demands a paradigm shift in the software engineering mind-set. This shifts focus begins in requirements engineering. This article is part of a special issue on the Future of Software Engineering.

Guiding requirements engineering for software-intensive embedded systems in the automotive industry

Over the past decade, a dramatic increase of functionality, quantity, size, and complexity of software-intensive embedded systems in the automotive industry can be observed. In particular, the growing complexity drives current requirements engineering practices to the limits. In close cooperation between partners from industry and academia, the recently completed REMsES (Requirements Engineering and Management for software-intensive Embedded Systems) project has developed a guideline to support requirements engineering processes in the automotive industry. The guideline enables the requirements engineers to cope with the challenges that arise due to quantity, size and complexity of software-intensive systems. This article presents the major results of the project, namely, the fundamental principles of the approach, the guideline itself, the tool support, and the major findings obtained during the evaluation of the approach.

Who is the advocate?: stakeholders for sustainability

While the research community has started working on sustainable software engineering recently, one question that is often asked still remains unanswered: who are the stakeholders? Who are the people who actually have an interest in improving the sustainability of a specific software system or of the discipline of software engineering itself? And who are the devils advocates? Having no explicit stakeholders is a problem as improvement of sustainability is challenging without a driving force. An objective that has no stakeholder is not likely to receive sufficient attention to be realized and will eventually disappear. In this paper, we present four approaches of identifying stakeholders for sustainability in a given context: top-down by sustainability dimensions (individual, social, environmental, economic, and technical), by instantiation of a generic list, bottom-up by an organigram, and iteratively by an activity model according to the generic sustainability model. We furthermore analyze the feasibility by a small case study for each approach. As the stakeholders are the key persons determining whether or not any objective is achieved, identifying the stakeholders for sustainability is crucial for successfully implementing sustainability support in a given context.

Massively distributed authorship of academic papers

Wiki-like or crowdsourcing models of collaboration can provide a number of benefits to academic work. These techniques may engage expertise from different disciplines, and potentially increase productivity. This paper presents a model of massively distributed collaborative authorship of academic papers. This model, developed by a collective of thirty authors, identifies key tools and techniques that would be necessary or useful to the writing process. The process of collaboratively writing this paper was used to discover, negotiate, and document issues in massively authored scholarship. Our work provides the first extensive discussion of the experiential aspects of large-scale collaborative research.