Software industry awareness on sustainable software engineering: a Brazilian perspective

Abstract

Sustainable computing is a rapidly growing research area spanning several areas of computer science. In the software engineering field, the topic has received increasing attention in recent years, with several studies addressing a range of concerns. However, few studies have demonstrated the awareness of software practitioners about the underlying concepts of sustainability in the software development practice. In this effect, this study aims to provide some evidence regarding the practitioners’ perception about the adoption of sustainability in software development, under four main perspectives: economic, social, environmental, and technical. In previous work, we carried out a preliminary survey study with twenty-five software engineers who work in a range of domains. The yielded results indicate an overall lack of knowledge about the topic, in particular, related to concepts about sustainable software. In this study, we extend the survey and reached a number of ninety-seven respondents. The novel results confirmed the evidence raised in the original survey that sustainability in the context of software is a new subject for software practitioners. However, professionals have shown interest in it. There is a general understanding that sustainability should be treated as a quality attribute. Among the observed perspectives, we generated an initial theory, which shows that software practitioners know the subject around ‘Green in Software’, even unconsciously. This study contributes to the green and sustainable software engineering field by bringing evidence on comprehending how the software industry understands the adoption of sustainability in the software development process.

An Exploratory Study of Software Sustainability at Early Stages of Software Development

“…Consequently, the proposed catalog can provide a foundation for developing a prototype that can assist professionals in the identification of sustainability requirements for different types of software applications. The survey results corroborate findings from prior studies such as [14][15][16] discussed in Table 1. Sustainability in the context of SE is found to be a relatively new topic.…”

“…The researchers in [14] ran a study that focused on software industry comprehension of sustainability. The study's data set was limited to only Brazil.…”

“…Even though sustainability has been reckoned as a nonfunctional requirement [8,12,13], still the standard software quality models do not offer sufficient provision for sustainability requirements and apprehensions. The scientific literature suggests the need for further discussion on the understanding and identification of sustainability requirements [10,14].…”

O Ensino de Qualidade de Software nas IES Públicas do Paraná: um Estudo Exploratório

“…Entende-se, dessa forma, ser fundamental que os egressos dos cursos de Computac ¸ão, especialmente de Engenharia de Software, se formem com habilidades técnicas e sociais para serem inseridos na indústria de software. Aliada a essas habilidades, a QS se torna um requisito essencial para a academia e para a indústria de software, conforme discutidos nos trabalhos de [Karita et al 2021], [Cico et al 2021] e [Richardson et al 2011].…”

“…Nesse contexto de qualidade, [Karita et al 2021] e [Garousi and Felderer 2017] apontam que um dos fatores relacionados à falta de software de qualidade presente no mercado é a carência do ensino de aspectos relacionados à Qualidade de Software em cursos de graduac ¸ão. Ainda, tem-se a rápida mudanc ¸a da área e as habilidades necessárias e esperadas aos egressos dos cursos na indústria.…”