Supporting Sustainability Aspects in 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. Our aim is to support the dimensions of sustainability human, social, economic, and environmental within different phases of the software lifecycle, especially requirements engineering and quality assurance. We contribute a description of the aspects of sustainability in software engineering. The application of sustainability actions on the basis of these aspects is sketched in usage scenarios. Keywords— sustainability, environment, software engineering, requirements engineering, quality assurance, guidance Although many people are by now aware of the general definition of sustainable development as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” [13], there still is no concrete guidance for the different aspects of sustainability that are observable from the point of view of software engineering. Problem Traditional software engineering has not fully supported sustainability as a relevant, first-class concern. This refers to green IT topics, which represent a part of the technical realization possibilities for a sustainable software system, as well as the broader role of software in understanding and tackling the issue, for example, examining the sustainability of the business processes supported by a software system in its application domain. Contribution We describe the different aspects of sustainability from a point of view of software engineering and exemplarily illustrate their consideration during requirements engineering and quality assurance. 1 Aspects of sustainability in the software lifecycle Sustainability aspects can be brought to bear both during the development and use of software systems. We distinguish four aspects of sustainability. The first two focus rather on the developing company and its processes, while the latter two have the system under development in scope. Development process aspect Sustainability in the initial software development process (with responsible use of ecological, human, and financial resources). For example, Naumann et al. propose guidelines for environmentally sustainable web development [12]. Lago et al. propose to measure the environmental impact of software services by their energy consumption [10]. Maintenance process aspect Sustainability of the software system during its maintenance period until replacement by a new system. This includes continuous monitoring of quality and knowledge management. For example, Albertao measures sustainability performance of a software project according to standard quality properties [6]. System production aspect Sustainability of the software system as product with respect to its use of resources for production, for example, by using green IT principles and sustainably produced hardware components. An administrative tool for strategic sustainable development is the ISO 14001 Environmental System Management Standard [3], which is embedded into a planning framework by MacDonald [8]. System usage aspect Sustainability in the usage processes in the application domain triggered by the software system as product. This takes into account responsibility in the impact on the environment and using green business processes. The probably most important step for analyzing and optimizing business processes is taken during requirements engineering, as proposed by Mahaux et al. [9]. Hilty et al. [7] propose a classification of ICT application types as starting point of such an analysis. All four aspects are relevant for an encompassing approach to supporting sustainability in software engineering. However, we particularly emphasize the system usage aspect, as our hypothesis is that it might have the biggest impact in terms of improvement potential.