Sustainable Software Engineering:A Perspective of Individual Sustainability

Abstract

Sustainable software engineering is a mean of developing sustainable software with sustainable software engineering process activities while balancing its various dimensions for instance economic, environmental, social, technical and individual. It is conveyed that the economic, technical, environmental and social dimensions are explored to satisfactory degree however the individual dimension of sustainable software engineering which is concerned with wellbeing of software engineers is not explored to satisfactory degree with respect to its understanding and challenges. Therefore, the aim of the study is to highlight and prioritize the challenges regarding individual sustainability dimension. The study also provides the mitigation strategies for the top five individual sustainability challenges. The systematic literature review has been performed to report the challenges and mitigation strategies. The study finding shows that lack of domain knowledge, lack of methodologies and tool support, lack of education, varying and unidentified situations and lack of sustainable software engineering practices are top most challenges regarding individual sustainability. These challenges need an urgent attention to achieve the goal of sustainable software engineering. The study also reports various mitigation strategies to overcome the risk of identified top most individual sustainability challenges such as to introduce sustainable software engineering education and knowledge in software engineering curricula, development of knowledge sharing frameworks and awareness regarding unclear and varying situations for each software engineering activity etc. The study will be beneficial for sustainable software engineering body of knowledge, sustainable software engineering practitioners and researchers by providing classified list of individual sustainability challenges and their mitigation strategies.

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

“…The existing work concerning identification of situational factors have got attention by the researcher in software requirement and for software development, however, less attention has been devoted concerning situational context in modern code review specifically, to support software engineers' sustainability [3], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12] that can be the reason of software failure [3], [11], [13], [14].…”

“…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].…”

“…The environmental sustainability aspect is related to the objective to lessen the negative influence of software engineering activities on the environment [2], [3], [24], [25]. The individual sustainability aspect is www.ijacsa.thesai.org related to well-being, education, and liberty of software engineers to sustain for longer [3], [4], [14]. Although valued work has been performed concerning to sustainable software engineering aspects i.e.…”

“…Presently, software engineers are confronted with the issue concerning their sustainability such as lack of competency in the identification of situational factors in the Modern Code Review (MCR) process [3], [8], [9], [13], [14]. MCR is an important software engineering activity also known as a lightweight version of Fagan's inspection where developer other than source code author review the source code and guide the author in improving the quality of source code [16], [17], [26], [27], [28].…”

“…It is stated that the above issue can cause a decrease in the competency and capability of software engineers towards problem understanding, and identification of unfamiliar situations [9], [15]. This issue can be addressed by situational awareness in MCR [9], [11], [14].…”