Leticia Duboc

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.

A framework for characterization and analysis of software system scalability

The term scalability appears frequently in computing literature, but it is a term that is poorly defined and poorly understood. The lack of a clear, consistent and systematic treatment of scalability makes it difficult to evaluate claims of scalability and to compare claims from different sources. This paper presents a framework for precisely characterizing and analyzing the scalability of a software system. The framework treats scalability as a multi-criteria optimization problem and captures the dependency relationships that underlie typical notions of scalability. The paper presents the results of a case study in which the framework and analysis method were applied to a real-world system, demonstrating that it is possible to develop a precise, systematic characterization of scalability and to use the characterization to compare the scalability of alternative system designs.

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.

A systematic mapping study on creativity in requirements engineering

In the last years, the field of creativity for requirements engineering has received a growing interest from researchers and practitioners. This paper presents a mapping study to aggregate literature in this field. The motivation is to identify trends and research opportunities in the application of creativity approaches to support the requirements engineering. The mapping study analyzed 46 papers. The results show four main research groups working on creativity in RE. Requirements elicitation is the phase concentrating the majority of studies. The study confirms that creativity techniques enhance creative thinking in requirements activities. However, creative thinking strategies should be fully integrated in current requirements engineering processes, methods and tools.

A framework for modelling and analysis of software systems scalability

Scalability is a widely-used term in scientific papers, technical magazines and software descriptions. Its use in the most varied contexts contribute to a general confusion about what the term really means. This lack of consensus is a potential source of problems, as assumptions are made in the face of a scalability claim. A clearer and widely-accepted understanding of scalability is required to restore the usefulness of the term. This research investigates commonly found definitions of scalability and attempts to capture its essence in a systematic framework. Its expected contribution is in assisting software developers to reason, characterize, communicate and adjust the scalability of software systems.

Systematic Elaboration of Scalability Requirements through Goal-Obstacle Analysis

Scalability is a critical concern for many software systems. Despite the recognized importance of considering scalability from the earliest stages of development, there is currently little support for reasoning about scalability at the requirements level. This paper presents a goal-oriented approach for eliciting, modeling, and reasoning about scalability requirements. The approach consists of systematically identifying scalability-related obstacles to the satisfaction of goals, assessing the likelihood and severity of these obstacles, and generating new goals to deal with them. The result is a consolidated set of requirements in which important scalability concerns are anticipated through the precise, quantified specification of scaling assumptions and scalability goals. The paper presents results from applying the approach to a complex, large-scale financial fraud detection system.

Sustainability design in requirements engineering: state of practice

Sustainability is now a major concern in society, but there is little understanding of how it is perceived by software engineering professionals and how sustainability design can become an embedded part of software engineering process. This paper presents the results of a qualitative study exploring requirements engineering practitioners’ perceptions and attitudes towards sustainability. It identifies obstacles and mitigation strategies regarding the application of sustainability design principlesin daily work life. The results of this study reveal several factors that can prevent sustainability design from becoming a first class citizen in software engineering: software practitioners tend to have a narrow understanding of the concept of sustainability; organizations show limited awareness of its potential opportunities and benefits; and the norms in the discipline are not conducive to sustainable outcomes. These findings suggest the need for focused efforts in sustainability education, but also a need to rethink professional norms and practices.

A Case Study in Eliciting Scalability Requirements

Scalability is widely recognized as an important software quality, but it is a quality that historically has lacked a consistent and systematic treatment. To address this problem, we recently presented a framework for the characterization and analysis of software systems scalability. That initial work did not provide means to instantiate the variables and functions to be used in the analysis, which could compromise its results. This risk can be mitigated through a systematic exploration of system scalability goals in the application domain during requirements engineering. This paper describes our application of goal-oriented requirements engineering (GORE) for eliciting the scalability requirements of a large, real-world financial fraud detection system. The case study reveals both the suitability and the limitations of GORE as a technique for eliciting the information needed by stakeholders to specify scalability goals of a system. In the paper, we describe these findings in detail and chart a course for future research in extending goal-oriented techniques to scalability requirements.

Creativity patterns guide: support for the application of creativity techniques in requirements engineering

Creativity techniques are tools for stimulating creative thinking. The importance of creativity fostering techniques in software development has been recognized and investigated by researchers for over a decade, yet the greater software engineering (SE) community makes little use of the myriads of techniques available. In order to encourage a wider adoption and to support the use of creativity techniques in software development, we have reviewed a large number of creativity techniques and have created a Creativity Patterns Guide. This paper describes the part of the guide tailored for the requirements engineering phase. The guide has been evaluated in real-world projects.

The challenges of representing transparency as patterns

Patterns are an invaluable tool for capturing and reusing Non-Functional Requirements (NFR) knowledge. Their construction, however, requires one to pay close attention to the semantics of its elements. This paper reports two important insights realized when developing a collection of Transparency patterns; they concern the semantics of the HELP contribution link and of the correlation link between NFR softgoals. The drawbacks of using these interdependency types are discussed and solutions are presented. The discussion is relevant to anyone attempting to develop precise catalogs for capturing NFR knowledge.