=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1138/et4
|storemode=property
|title=State of the Practice for Sustainability as an Explicit Objective
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1138/et4.pdf
|volume=Vol-1138
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==State of the Practice for Sustainability as an Explicit Objective==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1138/et4.pdf
State of the Practice for Sustainability as an
Explicit Objective
Birgit Penzenstadler1 , Mahvish Khurum2 , and Kai Petersen2
1
University of California, Irvine
bpenzens@uci.edu
2
Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden
{Mahvish.Khurum|Kai.Petersen}@bth.se
Abstract. Sustainability in its various facets has become an important
aspect of engineering software. However, we have only few guidelines on
how to incorporate sustainability as an overall objective from the very
beginning of software systems development.
In previous work, we provide a discussion on including sustainability dur-
ing requirements engineering and while taking software product manage-
ment decisions. To gather further information about the state of practice,
we propose this questionnaire to investigate more real life examples from
the experience of the survey participants.
These data points will facilitate insights on the state of practice and
allow us to improve the description of a systematic guidance. Both makes
incorporating sustainability easier to apply for requirements engineers.
Keywords: Sustainability, value-based software engineering, require-
ments engineering, decision-making, software product management
1 Background & Motivation
Over the last decades, sustainability research has emerged as an interdisciplinary
area; knowledge about how to achieve sustainable development has grown, while
political action towards the goal is still in its infancy [2].
Sustainability must be discussed with reference to a concrete system in order
to be meaningful—such as an ecological system, a human network, or even a
specific software system. Furthermore, sustainability has a number of di↵erent
aspects, inter alia an economic, social, and environmental perspective [1,6]. The
fact that when humankind talks about sustainability, we usually refer to the
objective of maintaining our own well-being over an extended period of time,
means that even an explicit focus on environmental sustainability will necessarily
entail some social and some economic considerations. Therefore, within the scope
of our research, we target environmental sustainability as major aspect, but this
can only be achieved if we consider overall sustainability as main objective. For
IT or software systems, sustainability can be understood in two ways:
– Green in IT: Any IT system can be modified (“greened”) in such a way that
it (a) consumes less energy, (b) is manufactured using sustainably produced
hardware components, (c) is developed using a sustainable development pro-
cess, and (d) uses renewable energy sources. The scope is the software system
as status quo technical system independent of the specific purpose of the sys-
tem. This is also denoted as Green IT and a well-known example are green
data centers.
– Green through IT: On top of Green in IT, the scope can be extended to take
into account the system purpose. This means considering di↵erent types of
solutions for making our lives more sustainable, for example software sys-
tems that support saving resources (carbon foot print trackers, smart home
applications, energy-saving apps), sharing resources (car sharing, tool shar-
ing, server sharing), and informing systems (educational systems on climate
change, water pollution, biodiversity, environmental hazards).
Both of these understandings yet have to be explored in a more systematic
way by requirements engineering as well as by software engineering in general.
Software Engineering for Sustainability3 [3,5] has developed as a current focus of
research due to sustainability being advocated as major objective for behavior
change on a global scale.
2 Surrounding Research & Study Plan
The online questionnaire “Sustainability in Value-based Software Engineering”
was created on the basis of previous work presented at the International Work-
shop on Software Product Management at REFSQ 2013. In that paper, we dis-
cussed the importance of incorporating the di↵erent aspects of sustainability
into product management decisions [4].
In addition to the discussion at the workshop, we prepared the online ques-
tionnaire belonging to this proposal. As it triggered only 23 responses after ad-
vertisement at the workshop and informal advertising in the personal network of
the presenting author at the conference, we want to conduct a second round in a
separate data set to retrieve more responses that allow for statistic significance.
The study is expected to gather further information about the state of prac-
tice. We propose this questionnaire to investigate more real life examples from
the experience of the survey participants.
These data points will facilitate insights on the state of practice and allow us
to improve the description of a systematic guidance. Consequently, the plans on
the continuation of the study after REFSQ14 are (1) to make the results available
to participants and research community, (2) to enrich the description of how to
incorporate sustainability into software decisions with concrete examples, and
(3) to fine-tune our guidance.
3
http://se4s.ics.uci.edu/
2.1 Goal & Hypothesis
Our goal is to get an insight into the rating of importance and the state of
practice of including the di↵erent aspects of sustainability in the community as
well as to gather experiences from practice in dealing with sustainability issues.
Our hypothesis is that the values representing the aspects will be rated with
a higher importance than their current consideration will be rated. Furthermore,
we expect that at least half of the participants call recall various situations of
their personal experience in software development where these values might have
been considered.
2.2 Benefits
The data points will facilitate insights on the state of practice and allow to
improve the description of a systematic guidance. Both makes incorporating
sustainability easier to apply for the requirements engineering community. The
analysis will be shared with the participants and reported to the research com-
munity. Furthermore, the result data of the study will be made available to the
community.
2.3 Subjects
The only prerequisite for being a subject is having developed software at some
point during the subject’s career, independent of the size of the system. We are
interested in the whole range of experiences and backgrounds—persons who are
currently requirements engineers, persons who have requirements engineering
experience, or it could even be software engineers in general (including require-
ments engineers as well as receivers of requirements down the line).
The benefits to the subjects of participating in the study are (1) a reflection
on how they personally incorporate sustainability into their current decision
making, (2) an insight on how their peers incorporate it when the results are
analyzed, and (3) improved guidance with enhanced examples on how to incor-
porate sustainability aspects into decision making when the guide is reworked.
To motivate participation, the first author will advertise throughout the con-
ference in person and hand out little paper slips with the QR code and URL of
the questionnaire. Apart from convincing potential participants in personal con-
versation, we will also hand out little give-aways and sweets to create a playful
version of a favor to call in. This simple psychological tweak does not always
work but has helped in the experience of the authors.
2.4 Development and Planned Analysis
We follow the standard procedures for questionnaires according to the literature.
The questionnaire was prepared in draft iterations that were reviewed internally
(by all authors) and externally (by researchers not involved in the project). The
questionnaire will be available online from the start day of the conference to the
end of the following month (7th April - 31st of May 2014), so that participants
can fill it in either directly at the conference or in the weeks to follow. The
data will be gathered by the tool Unipark Questback (http://www.unipark.
info) and analyzed in June ’14. We will consolidate the data of closed and open
questions and visualize the results in appropriate ways.
3 The Questionnaire
This questionnaire (print version attached) evaluates a list of value aspects that
should be taken into consideration for incorporating sustainability while taking
software product management decisions. In the given context, these ‘manage-
ment decisions’ are all decisions that relate to whether a requirement will or
will not be considered during product development. It is an approach to using
a catalog of value aspects for product management decisions for the purpose
of supporting di↵erent aspects of sustainability during software system develop-
ment.
We would like participants to rate the importance of given value aspects
for human, social, economic, environmental, and technical sustainability. For
every value in these categories, we provide a definition, a rationale (why this
value matters), and an example. We then ask (1) how well the value is currently
taken into account, (2) how important the participant considers it to be, and (3)
whether the participant can think of an example in their own experience where
consideration might have been beneficial.
(a) Banner of the Questionnaire in the
REFSQ WebApp (b) The QR code
Fig. 1: WebApp Banner and QR code
To complete the survey at http://ww2.unipark.de/uc/REFSQ14-sustain
including examples will take 10-15 minutes, depending on how much use of the
free text fields the participants make. In case participants would agree to be
contacted for a personal interview or would like to be informed about the survey’s
results, we provide them with the opportunity to leave their email address on
the last page of the survey. The survey is attached in the appendix.
4 Success Factors
4.1 Threats to validity
The constraints of performing the study at REFSQ are:
– Software engineers attending the conference might be better educated than
the general software engineer. Therefore, they might be more aware of sus-
tainability issues and rate their importance higher than the average practi-
tioner. Considering the fact that sustainability is on one hand perceiving a
lot of attention anywhere in industry right now and is just being picked up
as research topic, this threat is limited.
– Participants with a rather academic background might not have as many
situations to recall upon where they had to take decisions in software devel-
opment that would have been a↵ected by the sustainability aspects due to
the fact that many of the software systems researchers develop are proto-
types to prove concepts and not software products. This would not limit the
validity of the study but it would narrow the richness of the data. However,
REFSQ attendance does have a decent percentage of practitioners and our
e↵orts will be directed at gathering many participants from industry.
4.2 Publicity
As described in the subsection Subjects, the first author will advertise throughout
the conference in person and hand out little paper slips with the QR code (see
Fig 1b) and URL of the questionnaire that can also be answered on a handheld
device. Apart from convincing potential participants in personal conversation,
we will also hand out little give-aways and sweets. We will also set up a “surprise”
box with those give-aways with little wrapped versions that include the QR code
and URL to reach out to those conference attendants who might prefer to be
less engaged in conversation but tend to pick up flyers and goodies.
5 Conclusion
This study reaches out to participants via a questionnaire to gather data on the
perception of di↵erent aspects of sustainability in software product management
and requirements engineering. Participants are asked to rate the actual and the
envisioned importance of sustainability values and are encouraged to provide
examples from their own experience. Follow-up interviews will be conducted if
agreed to. The analysis and results will be reported back to the participants and
the research community.
Acknowledgement
This work is part of the EnviroSiSE project (grant: PE2044/1-1) funded by the
DFG in Germany and the BESQ+ research project funded by the Knowledge
Foundation (grant: 20100311) in Sweden.
We would like to thank Daniel Mendez for his support with the questionnaire
tool and his feedback on an earlier version of the questionnaire. Furthermore we
would like to thank the participants of the 2013 edition of the Intl. Workshop
on Software Product Management as well as the anonymous reviewers for their
feedback on an earlier version of the questionnaire as well as the underlying
research.
References
1. Brundtland et al. Our common future, 1987. United Nations Conference on Envi-
ronment and Development (UNCED).
2. L. Hilty, W. Lohmann, and E. Huang. Sustainability and ICT — an overview of
the field. In Proceedings of the EnviroInfo 2011, 2011.
3. B. Penzenstadler. Towards a definition of sustainability in and for software engi-
neering. In 28th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC), 2013.
4. B. Penzenstadler, M. Khurum, and K. Petersen. Towards incorporating sustain-
ability while taking software product management decisions. In 7th International
Workshop of Software Product Management, at REFSQ, 2013.
5. B. Penzenstadler, A. Raturi, D. Richardson, C. Calero, H. Femmer, and X. Franch.
Systematic Mapping Study on Software Engineering for Sustainability (SE4S). In
18th Intl. Conf. on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering, 2014.
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