The Karlskrona manifesto for sustainability design

Sustainability is a central concern for our society, and software systems increasingly play a central role in it. As designers of software technology, we cause change and are responsible for the effects of our design choices. We recognize that there is a rapidly increasing awareness of the fundamental need and desire for a more sustainable world, and there is a lot of genuine goodwill. However, this alone will be ineffective unless we come to understand and address our persistent misperceptions. The Karlskrona Manifesto for Sustainability Design aims to initiate a much needed conversation in and beyond the software community by highlighting such perceptions and proposing a set of fundamental principles for sustainability design

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

Mind the Gap: Bridging the Sustainable Software Systems Research Divide

Sustainability is a major concern to humanity as a result of the consequences of the rapid consumption of the planets finite natural resources, combined with exponential economic and population growth. Principally associated with the field of ecology, sustainability has emerged as an important area of research in a number of sub-fields within the domain of computing including human-computer interaction. While these communities have attempted to address the challenges of sustainability from their different perspectives, there is a severe lack of common understanding of the fundamental concepts of sustainability and how they relate to software systems. As a result, there is a need for a common ground and consistent terminology to reduce the replication of effort. This paper presents the Karlskrona Manifesto for Sustainabilty Design as a mechanism for initiating a conversation between the different communities in addressing the challenges of developing sustainable software systems

Experiences from Applying the Karlskrona Manifesto Principles for Sustainability in Software System Design

Sustainability in software design is an evolving area that requires more practical guide on how software designers, developers and requirement engineers can elicit software sustain- ability requirements. The Karlskrona Manifesto for Sustainabil- ity Design (KMSD) principles serve as a common ground to guide and support sustainability in software design.However, there is little research as of now showing how these KMSD principles are applied in software requirements elicitation and software design in general. This paper presents some of our evaluation of how these KMSD principles, the software sustaina- bility requirement template and software sustainability require- ment best practice template were applied in two case studies by stakeholders (requirement engineers, CTO and software develop- ers)

Approach to Include Sustainability and Creativity in Requirements Engineering

Silveira, C., Santos, V., Reis, L., & Mamede, H. (2022). CRESustain: Approach to Include Sustainability and Creativity in Requirements Engineering. Journal of Engineering Research and Sciences, 1(8), 27-34. https://doi.org/10.55708/js0108004, https://doi.org/10.55708/js0108Requirements Engineering is an evolving field facing new challenges. One of the central conundrums is sustainability in software. The possibility of using known creativity techniques while introducing the dimensions of sustainability to help provide unexpected, original, practical, and sustainable answers in software development is challenging and motivating. This paper proposes an approach, CRESustain, incorporating sustainability dimensions when introducing creativity techniques in the Requirements Engineering process. CRESustain uses various creativity techniques considered appropriate for the different stages of the RE process. It is inspired by the Sustainable Development Goals, creative problem-solving methods, and the Karlskrona Manifesto. The methodology applied to give materiality to the outcome of this work was Design Science Research, a research paradigm that uses knowledge to solve problems, generate new knowledge and insights, and results in an artefact. The main results indicate that the approach stimulates discussion about sustainability in technical, economic, social, human, and environmental dimensions focusing on the Sustainable Development Goals and people's needs.publishersversionpublishe

The case of social organizations

Silveira, C., Reis, L., Santos, V., & Mamede, H. S. (2020). Creativity in prototypes design and sustainability: The case of social organizations. Advances in Science, Technology and Engineering Systems, 5(6), 1237-1243. https://doi.org/10.25046/AJ0506147The role of creativity techniques in the design of prototypes is of particular interest given its potential for innovation. At same time, despite the efforts of decades in terms of policies and programs of action, humanity has not yet come close to global sustainability. Sustainability design must involve society and creatively employ all available knowledge sources for creating sustainable software. This paper proposes a prototype design approach rooted in employing creativity techniques, while being guided by the dimensions and principles of the Karlskrona Manifesto. This approach is applied to the development of a multidisciplinary aggregator for the optimization of social services. As a result. guidelines for the use of creativity in requirements engineering will be presented, as well as on how to include sustainability issues, namely the Sustainable Development Goals and the five dimensions of sustainability in the design of prototypes.publishersversionpublishe

Report on the Third Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE3)

This report records and discusses the Third Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE3). The report includes a description of the keynote presentation of the workshop, which served as an overview of sustainable scientific software. It also summarizes a set of lightning talks in which speakers highlighted to-the-point lessons and challenges pertaining to sustaining scientific software. The final and main contribution of the report is a summary of the discussions, future steps, and future organization for a set of self-organized working groups on topics including developing pathways to funding scientific software; constructing useful common metrics for crediting software stakeholders; identifying principles for sustainable software engineering design; reaching out to research software organizations around the world; and building communities for software sustainability. For each group, we include a point of contact and a landing page that can be used by those who want to join that group's future activities. The main challenge left by the workshop is to see if the groups will execute these activities that they have scheduled, and how the WSSSPE community can encourage this to happen

Raising awareness for potential sustainability effects in Uganda: A survey-based empirical study

Copyright © 2019 for this paper by its authors. In July 2019, we ran the 3rd International BRIGHT summer school for Software Engineering and Information Systems at the Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. The participants developed a group project over the course of the week, which included the application of the Sustainability Awareness Framework. The framework promotes discussion on the impact of software systems on sustainability based on a set of questions. In this paper, we present the educational evaluation of the Sustainability Awareness Framework in a country in Sub-Saharan Africa. The results indicate that the framework can provide supportive guidance of the societal and environmental challenges in the given context