Software Engineering for Sustainability: Find the Leverage Points!

Abstract

Software Engineering helps deliver software systems that can enable humanity to reach new levels of prosperity. That experience in building complex, interdependent and globally distributed systems can also be leveraged for sustainability challenges. Humanity faces a number of global, interdependent, and complex challenges that present a risk to societies, including climate change, large scale involuntary migration, and poverty [18]. As software professionals, we can contribute to sustainability through the software systems that we engineer, and it is our social responsibility to do so [21]. But sustainability problems are complex system problems (see SIDEBAR Sustainability). How can we understand the complex dynamics that arise in the interaction within multifaceted social, economic, or ecological systems? One approach to identifying successful sustainability interventions is to consider leverage pointslocations within a system where a small change in one aspect can result in signi icant system-wide changes [10]. This article suggests leverage points (LP) can help software engineers to address sustainability challenges by offering insights on possible transformation mechanisms and/or ways to ind alternatives. While LP will not tell us exactly how to act on sustainability challenges, they provide an analysis tool to help practitioners to identify elements that can bring about effective change at different levels, for a (software) system and the wider system it resides in. As sustainability is a crosscutting (orthogonal) concern, LPs are bene icial as they enable intervention on different levels. We use the example of the UK public transportation system [23] to illustrate how leverage points can contribute to software engineering for sustainability. SIDEBAR Sustainability The Oxford English Dictionary [13] de ines sustainability as 'the capacity to endure'. The Brundtland commission de ined sustainable development as 'meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs' [3]. However, to understand the broader sustainability issues, we must ask which system to sustain, for whom, over which time frame, and at what cost [16]. This involves ive interrelated dimensions [2]: • The individual dimension covers individual freedom and agency, human dignity, and ful illment. It includes individuals' ability to thrive, exercise their rights, and develop freely. • The social dimension covers relationships between individuals and groups. It covers the structures of mutual trust and communication in a social system and the balance between con licting interests. • The economic dimension covers inancial aspects and business value. It includes capital growth and liquidity, investment questions, and inancial operations. • The technical dimension covers the ability to maintain and evolve arti icial systems (such as software) over time. It refers to maintenance and evolution, resilience, and the ease of system transitions. • The environmental dimension covers the use and stewardsh...

Tailoring Requirements Negotiation to Sustainability

“…The concept of sustainability has emerged as an area of growing interest in the field of software and requirements engineering [10,11,12,13,14,15,16]; which is understood as the 'capacity' of a system 'to endure' [17]. A closely related term, sustainable development, was defined by the Brundtland Commission as 'meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs' [18].…”

“…Another direction for future improvement of the method is to use system dynamics models to help visualise, analyse, and understand the balancing and reinforcing feedback loops and their effects within a specific problem domain [16]. Overall, improved visualisation of effects instead of merely using Excel can be an interesting investigation for next case studies.…”

Software Engineering in Civic Tech A Case Study about Code for Ireland

“…In other related fields, such as HCI, the focus has turned onto examining the a) dynamics of technology in public life, b) civic discourse on social media, c) civic engagement, d) data literacy, e) social justice and f) trust, often using in-the-wild approaches of systems in communities [3,6]. In addition, both SE [24,25,26] and human-computer interaction (HCI) [27,28,29] share a recent turn of interest onto sustainability matters, which has a close link with civic tech, as the focus is put on the environment, peoples' behavior and the role of technology [3].…”

Situational Factors for Modern Code Review to Support Software Engineers’ Sustainability

“…Sustainable software engineering is presently a major concern in software development [1], [2]. It has five major aspects such as individual, social, economic, environmental, and technical [3], [4]. It is argued that work has been done regarding technical, economic, social, and environmental aspect of sustainable software engineering, however, individual sustainability aspect has been given less attention by the researchers and it warrants future research [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7].…”

“…Sustainability in software engineering is a noteworthy part of practices in the disciplines [1], [2]. It is defined as the "capacity to endure" [4]. There are five sustainability aspects reported in the literature such as individual, social, economic, environmental and technical [3], [4], [13], [14].…”