The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in Systems Engineering: Eliciting sustainability requirements

This paper discusses a PhD research project testing the hypothesis that using the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals(SDG) as explicit inputs to drive the Software Requirements Engineering process will result in requirements with improved sustainability benefits. The research has adopted the Design Science Research Method (DSRM) [21] to test a process named SDG Assessment for Requirements Elicitation (SDGARE). Three DSRM cycles are being used to test the hypothesis in safety-critical, highprecision, software-intensive systems in aerospace and healthcare. Initial results from the first two DSRM cycles support the hypothesis. However, these cycles are in a plan-driven (waterfall) development context and future research agenda would be a similar application in an Agile development context.Comment: 7th International Conference on ICT for Sustainability (ICT4S2020), June 21--26, 2020, Bristol, United Kingdom. ACM has non-exclusive licence to publis

Sustainability in Software Engineering

The intersection between software engineering re- search and the problems related to sustainability and green IT has been the subject of increasing attention. In spite of that, we observe that sustainability is still not clearly defined, or understood, in the field of software engineering. This lack of clarity leads to confusion about e.g. what is relevant to measure or the research implications over time or space. This paper provides an overview of how the research so far has defined sustainability, and how this definition has been used to guide which research areas. To this end, we carried out a systematic mapping study for selecting, classifying and analyzing relevant publications. In this study, we investigate which knowledge areas and which time scope of sustainability effects are mostly targeted in scientific research. Our analysis shows research trends and discusses gaps to be filled

Modeling the impact of UAVs in sustainability

This work has been supported by Junta de Extremadura (according to the Order 129/2015 of the 2nd of June) and NOVA LINCS Research Laboratory (Ref. UID/CEC/04516/2013).In the last few years, sustainability has become one of the priority lines for many companies and organizations, especially public administrations. This trend has been even more evident in some regions where the preservation of natural resources is of utmost importance, not only from an environmental perspective, but also from an economic one. In this context, technology has become one of the key factors to achieve sustainability goals. An example of these technologies are Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) which are being used more and more with sustainability purposes. However, although some efforts have been made to propose software approaches to model sustainability, some examples that model the impact of technology on sustainability are still needed. This paper presents an instance of a sustainability metamodel for the UAVs domain. This model allows to specify the impact of UAV-based processes on sustainability, and also to identify potential limitations that may hinder its applicability. Finally, the paper provides some suggestions to complete the metamodel based on the instantiation process

Towards the use of unmanned aerial systems for providing sustainable services in smart cities

La sostenibilidad está en el centro de muchos campos de aplicación en los que el uso de los sistemas aéreos no tripulados (SUA) es cada vez más importante (por ejemplo, la agricultura, la detección y predicción de incendios, la vigilancia ambiental, la cartografía, etc.). Sin embargo, su uso y evolución están muy condicionados por el campo de aplicación específico para el que están diseñados y, por lo tanto, no pueden ser fácilmente reutilizados entre los diferentes campos de aplicación. Desde este punto de vista, al no ser polivalentes, podemos decir que no son totalmente sostenibles. Teniendo esto en cuenta, el objetivo de este trabajo es doble: por un lado, identificar el conjunto de características que debe proporcionar un UAS para ser considerado sostenible y demostrar que no hay ningún UAS que satisfaga todas estas características; por otra parte, presentar una arquitectura abierta y sostenible de los UAS que pueda utilizarse para construir UAS a petición para proporcionar las características necesarias en cada campo de aplicación. Dado que esta arquitectura se basa principalmente en la adaptabilidad del software y el hardware, contribuye a la sostenibilidad técnica de las ciudades.Sustainability is at the heart of many application fields where the use of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) is becoming more and more important (e.g., agriculture, fire detection and prediction, environmental surveillance, mapping, etc.). However, their usage and evolution are highly conditioned by the specific application field they are designed for, and thus, they cannot be easily reused among different application fields. From this point of view, being that they are not multipurpose, we can say that they are not fully sustainable. Bearing this in mind, the objective of this paper is two-fold: on the one hand, to identify the whole set of features that must be provided by a UAS to be considered sustainable and to show that there is no UAS satisfying all these features; on the other hand, to present an open and sustainable UAS architecture that may be used to build UAS on demand to provide the features needed in each application field. Since this architecture is mainly based on software and hardware adaptability, it contributes to the technical sustainability of cities.• Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad y Fondos FEDER. Proyecto TIN2015-69957-R (I+D+i) • Junta de Extremadura y Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional. Ayuda GR15098 y IB16055 • Parcialmente financiado por Interreg V-A España-Portugal (POCTEP) 2014-2020 program. Proyecto 0045-4IE-4-PpeerReviewe

A concern-oriented sustainability approach

Sustainability and sustainable development has become a concern worldwide, hence introduced in roadmaps and strategies of public and private organizations. This trend has not been neglected by the computer science community, who is increasingly considering sustainability as a first class entity in software development. To properly address sustainability, its various dimensions need to be reasoned about and their impact on each other and on other system concerns studied from the very early stages of software development. To this purpose, we present a concern-oriented requirements approach that allows both, modeling sustainability concepts and their relationships, and managing conflicting situations triggered by impacts among sustainability dimensions or between those and other system concerns. To tackle the complexity of conflict management, a rigorous trade-off analysis technique based on multi-criteria decision making methods is used to rank, stakeholders and effects between concerns' responsibilies. We use a real project to validate our proposal, discuss the results obtained and synthesize major points that require further research

Situational factors for modern code review to support software engineers' sustainability

Software engineers working in Modern Code Review (MCR) are confronted with the issue of lack of competency in the identification of situational factors. MCR is a software engineering activity for the identification and fixation of defects before the delivery of the software product. This issue can be a threat to the individual sustainability of software engineers and it can be addressed by situational awareness. Therefore, the objective of the study is to identify situational factors concerning the MCR process. Systematic Literature Review (SLR) has been used to identify situational factors. Data coding along with continuous comparison and memoing procedures of grounded theory and expert review has been used to produce an exclusive and validated list of situational factors grouped under categories. The study results conveyed 23 situational factors that are grouped into 5 broad categories i.e. People, Organization, Technology, Source Code and Project. The study is valuable for researchers to extend the research and for software engineers to identify situations and sustain for longer

Posthumanism for Sustainability: A Scoping Review

The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between posthumanism and sustainability and contribute to the interdisciplinary concept of posthuman sustainability. We conducted a scoping review of 45 peer-reviewed journal articles that met our inclusion criteria and employed co-occurrence analysis based on the clustering techniques of the VOSviewer. We identified five themes within the articles: post-humanism, post-anthropocentrism, post-dualism, post-Enlightenment, and post-technologism. Through our analysis, we found that posthumanism can offer insights into ecological issues and help promote alternative sustainable practices. We also identified three immediate concerns for post/humanities scholars: (1) fostering dialogue between critical humanist and posthumanist scholarship based on onto-epistemological plurality, (2) achieving conceptual clarity in the field, and (3) advocating for meaningful engagement with indigenous worldviews in a multidimensional and multitemporal manner. By exploring the relationship between posthumanism and sustainability, we hope to expand our knowledge of the urgent ecological issues we face and contribute to interdisciplinary efforts to address them