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)

Requirements: The Key to Sustainability

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

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

Sustainability Debt: A Metaphor to Support Sustainability Design Decisions

Sustainability, the capacity to endure, is fundamental for the societies on our planet. Despite its increasing recognition in software engineering, it remains difficult to assess the delayed systemic effects of decisions taken in requirements engineering and systems design. To support this difficult task, this paper introduces the concept of sustainability debt. The metaphor helps in the discovery, documentation, and communication of sustainability issues in requirements engineering. We build on the existing metaphor of technical debt and extend it to four other dimensions of sustainability to help think about sustainability-aware software systems engineering. We highlight the meaning of debt in each dimension and the relationships between those dimensions. Finally, we discuss the use of the metaphor and explore how it can help us to design sustainability-aware software intensive systems

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

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 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 principles in 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

Temporal Discounting in Software Engineering : A Replication Study

Background: Many decisions made in Software Engineering practices are intertemporal choices: trade-offs in time between closer options with potential short-term benefit and future options with potential long-term benefit. However, how software professionals make intertemporal decisions is not well understood. Aim: This paper investigates how shifting time frames influence preferences in software projects in relation to purposefully selected background factors. Method: We investigate temporal discounting by replicating a questionnaire-based observational study. The replication uses a changed-population and -experimenter design to increase the internal and external validity of the original results. Results: The results of this study confirm the occurrence of temporal discounting in samples of both professional and student participants from different countries and demonstrate strong variance in discounting between study participants. We found that professional experience influenced discounting. Participants with broader professional experience exhibited less discounting than those with narrower experience. Conclusions: The results provide strong empirical support for the relevance and importance of temporal discounting in SE and the urgency of targeted interdisciplinary research to explore the underlying mechanisms and their theoretical and practical implications. The results suggest that technical debt management could be improved by increasing the breadth of experience available for critical decisions with long-term impact. In addition, the present study provides a methodological basis for replicating temporal discounting studies in software engineering.Peer reviewe