=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1216/report
|storemode=property
|title=Report on the 2nd International Workshop on Requirements Engineering for Sustainable Systems
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1216/report.pdf
|volume=Vol-1216
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/re/PenzenstadlerMS14a
}}
==Report on the 2nd International Workshop on Requirements Engineering for Sustainable Systems==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1216/report.pdf
Report on the 2nd International Workshop on
Requirements Engineering for Sustainable Systems
(RE4SuSy)
Birgit Penzenstadler Martin Mahaux Camille Salinesi
University of California, Irvine University of Namur Université Paris 1 - Sorbonne
Irvine, USA Namur, Belgium Paris, France
bpenzens@uci.edu martin.mahaux@fundp.ac.be camille@univ-paris1.fr
Abstract—Research has started investigating the support of • “Sustainability and Quality: Icing on the Cake”
sustainability within systems and software engineering.Yet there Coral Calero, Manuel F. Bertoa, Ma Angeles Moraga
are few workshops that explore the topic, and there is only one • “Using Intelligent Agents to Discover Energy Saving
so far in requirements engineering: RE4SuSy.
The 2nd International Workshop on Requirements Engineer- Opportunities within Data Centers”
ing for Sustainable Systems (RE4SuSy) was held at RE in 2013. Alexandre Mello Ferreira, Barbara Pernici
This report summarizes the workshop results and maps out • “Plant Guild Composer: A Software System for Sustain-
future research directions. ability”
I. M OTIVATION Juliet Norton, Alex J. Stringfellow, Joseph J. LaViola Jr.,
The topic of requirements engineering for sustainability Birgit Penzenstadler, Bill Tomlinson
and for sustainable systems has started to receive more at- Compared to last year, there was less emphasis on energy
tention within the research community. As a target venue consumption and energy efficiency, but more focus on different
for research in this area, we have started the International application areas and sustainability using IT systems as means
Workshop Series on Requirements Engineering for Sustainable to facilitate behavior change as well as more encompassing
Systems (RE4SuSy) in 2012 at the Working Conference on quality modeling that incorporates sustainability as a general
Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality objective for software development. This is also visible in the
(REFSQ’12) and continued in 2013 at the 21st International weighted topic model created from the full text versions of
Requirements Engineering Conference (RE’13). the RE4SuSy’13 contributions depicted in Fig. 1.
This report summarizes the workshop results of the 2nd
RE4SuSy that was held at RE’13 in Rio, Brasil, on July 15th
of 2013. The aim of this report is to ensure the continuity and III. D ISCUSSION S ESSIONS
traceability of the discussions initialized at the workshop, to
make a common point of reference available for the growing
The afternoon sessions of the workshop were used for dis-
community, and to facilitate collaborations amongst former
cussion in breakout groups. The small discussion sessions after
and future participants.
each paper presentation had brought up the following general
II. P RESENTATIONS questions about sustainability and software engineering:
The two morning sessions featured presentations of the
• How to define, evaluate, measure sustainability?
following contributions, all available in the online proceedings
• What are the various dimensions of this multi-
at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-995/:
dimensional optimisation problem, i.e., what is the cost
• “RE@21: Time to Sustain!”
function? Is there any single cost function that can
Birgit Penzenstadler, Henning Femmer
accumulate these dimensions?
• “An Assessment Technique for Sustainability: Applying
• How do sustainability and quality combine and/or com-
the IMAGINE Approach to Software Systems”
pare?
Alejandra Rodriguez, Birgit Penzenstadler
• What is the relation between participation and sustain-
• “Could Participation Support Sustainability in Require-
ability?
ments Engineering?”
Martin Mahaux We split up into two breakout groups: One on Comparison
• “The Social Dimension of Sustainability in Requirements of sustainability and quality & Indicators and Measures and
Engineering” one on Social Dimension & User Participation. Both groups
Timo Johann, Walid Maalej had vivid discussions with the major points summarized below.
Fig. 1. Weighted topic model according to the full texts of the RE4SuSy’13 contributions.
A. Discussion: Comparison of sustainability and quality & • A next important step is to investigate how to measure
Indicators and Measures 2nd order impacts and for that we might benefit from
The goal of the working group was to discuss questions learning from other fields like social enterprise metrics
regarding the definition, evaluation, and measurement of sus- and life cycle analysis.
tainability and how sustainability and quality combine and/or
compare. B. Discussion: Social Dimension & User Participation
• Can we talk about sustainability independent of other
aspects? The starting point of this discussion group was the question
• Sustainability is part of product quality (1st order impact)
of the relation between participation and sustainability.
and of quality in use (2nd order impact), where quality in • New ways to involve in RE process ? And impact on
use is more complicated as users and context are involved. sustainability ?
This means there are static aspects as well as dynamic • Does more involvement leads to more sustainability ?
aspects that have to be considered. • Does different involvement leads to diff sustainability ?
• Can we simply fix the problem of breaking down the • We need a sustainability definition to understand this.
goals, measuring, and then assigning a cost to everything? • Difference with market-?oriented software implies that
No, only in terms of software sustainability understood as social networks are a chance to participate.
maintenance or in the first order impact, but the market • Experimental RE and agile development are validated by
place has not yet assigned a value to the different aspects many users. Software engineers should have the right
of especially long?term environmental sustainability. people do the design for them. Experimental design
• For carrying this into business analysis, we have to con- involves real people.
vince the accountants, which can either be accomplished • (Massive) participation enables smaller communities to
by the cost savings argument that often applies for some be heard. Are we sure about this? Majorities can eat over
first order impacts, e.g. saving energy, or via the image minorities...
of the company argument that relates to the shareholder • But it needs to be aligned with participative doing...
value. • It is related to generalized expertise
• Participation has the opportunity to challenge business • What are characteristics for social sustainability?
models, and replace sustainable concerns at the centre? • Empirical investigation of interplay between user & sus-
Stress externalities. tainability
• Large user bases outperform experts. In graphical design • Work on characteristics for short and long-term sustain-
for example. Experts have lots of bias, due to their ability measures
financial links with other companies, lobbies,... Experts • Make stakeholders see the value of sustainability
may lack creativity, because they don’t try enough. • Analysis of interrelationship of the metrics from the case
• Crowd can be manipulated - it can be stupid sometimes... studies
• Diff between massive participation and smaller scale • Analysis of 2nd order impacts
participation. What about imagining other users. • Explicit part of the call RE4SuSy14: case studies and
• How participation is different in problem solving or failure stories
problem definition ? • Value proposition for stakeholders has to be pitched in the
• Will number of participants conflict with quality of inter- audience’s language (will maybe turn RE into superset of
action ? Or how to have techniques where involvement BA as required to understand all trade-offs in value)
can be of high quality and massive ? The results and future steps were summarized on a poster
• How to find participation techniques that will overcome (Fig. 2) and presented to the conference participants in the
obstacles? poster session.
IV. R ESULTS VI. C ONCLUSION
The results that we derived from both discussions in the final The 2nd RE4SuSy brought interesting discussions and a
round, where one participant of each discussion group reported clearer vision of the research agenda. The 3rd edition of the
the group’s results to the rest of the workshop participants, are workshop will be held at RE 2015 and include more interactive
the following: sessions on a more specific work product to strengthen the
• Seeing sustainability as part of software quality and collaboration in the community.
quality in use
• Differentiate short-term and long-term and measures for
that
• Idea of calculating the cost for all factors into one
equation
• Relation between sustainability & innovation
• Wider view of the problem space
• Emphasis of social aspect and development for different
social situations and incentivizing user behavior
• User feedback and innovation from sustainability per-
spective is new direction
• Trade-offs and how to deal with them
• More problem-driven and/or empirical work might im-
prove research results (tool demos etc)
• Measures & metrics: danger in comparing to traceability,
where it is still difficult to compare results from different
case studies, plus danger of optimizing measures instead
of reaching objectives
• Matured scoping, but goes further than “quality only”
V. F UTURE S TEPS
The future steps that are the upcoming research challenges
and the activities that will bring the research community
forward were identified as the following:
• Case study series for measures and metrics
• Sustainability for specific software systems in case stud-
ies
• BoK with definitions and case studies, research agenda
as starting point but add more content to it and structure
further (not only list, maybe wiki)
• User participation methods, define different types of user
participation
Fig. 2. Summary of results of the RE4SuSy’13 workshop discussions.