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https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2223/invited1.pdf
1
Report on the 7th International Workshop on
Requirements Engineering for Sustainable Systems
(RE4SuSy 2018)
Ahmed Alharti∗ , Ruzanna Chitchyan† , Abram Hindle‡ , Timo Kehrer§ , Birgit Penzenstadler¶ , Colin C. Ventersk
∗ RMIT, Australia, ahmed.alharthi@rmit.edu.au
† University of Bristol, UK, r.chitchyan@bristol.ac.uk
‡ University of Alberta, Canada, hindle1@ualberta.ca
§ Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany, timo.kehrer@informatik.hu-berlin.de
¶ California State University, Long Beach, USA, birgit.penzenstadler@csulb.edu
k University of Huddersfield, UK, c.venters@hud.ac.uk
Abstract—This year’s edition of the workshop was held at the there will be little or no demand for optimizing energy con-
Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Banff, Alberta, Canada at sumption. To address this, Hindle argues that Cloud services
the 26th International Conference on Requirements Engineering. should bill customers directly in order to motivate consumers
to consider the sustainability of the software services they
utilise. However, the challenges here are non-trivial: e.g., How
can energy consumption be measured directly in a Cloud
I. I NTRODUCTION
environment? What are the economic incentives for both Cloud
The RE4SuSy workshop series has established a strong and providers and Cloud consumers? How to create a paradigm
growing research community around the different aspects of shift towards sustainability in both Cloud providers and Cloud
sustainability and how to support them in requirements engi- consumers?
neering. Since requirements define how and what a software Discussion: During the workshop the discussion topics
will do, we maintain that requirements engineering is the key around this paper focused on the economic incentives, and
point in software engineering through which sustainability can challenges of measuring the energy consumption, the role of
be fostered. Thus, the RE4SuSy workshop series is concerned software in energy consumption, and the optimization of per-
with research on techniques, tools, and processes for sustain- ceptual distance. Perceptual distance denotes that information
ability through requirements engineering. about energy consumption needs to be a direct feedback with
Last year the workshop initiated an effort to start converging little delay, otherwise in the users’ view it will be discounted
the RE for sustainability community to a common set of from his/her consumption. For instance, when consumption
fundamentals. This edition of the RE4SuSy workshop has information is provided immediately at the end of a month,
built on the initial convergence effort, helping to clarify what before the beginning of the next month, where the energy
characteristics a requirement should possess, and/or what con- bill is seen to have increased significantly, the consumer may
straints it should meet in order to qualify as a “sustainability try to analyze and change his/her behavior accordingly for
requirement”. the new month. However, if he/she gets the feedback on
RE4SuSy is an interactive workshop: the contributors and increased consumption three months later, then he/she may
participants engaged into deep discussions and provided peer not be interested in a change.
feedback to all workshop submissions.
The program featured five presentations with moderated
III. T OWARDS T OOL - SUPPORT FOR S USTAINABILITY
discussions and working sessions. In the following, we give a
P ROFILING
brief summary of each.
This paper argues that the most effective decisions related to
sustainability of software are made in the early stages of the
II. I F YOU BILL IT, THEY WILL PAY: E NERGY
software development lifecycle. To support these decisions,
CONSUMPTION IN THE CLOUD WILL BE IRRELEVANT UNTIL
the authors introduce Sustainability Profiling for Software
DIRECTLY BILLED FOR
(SuSoftPro); a tool that can assist in analysing sustainability
Don’t leave the lights on! It is suggested that energy requirements. They present an analysis of the core features of
consumption of software systems and services is a significant SuSoftPro in comparison with two other approaches, which
issue as data-centers now account for a significant portion of utilise Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis. The effectiveness of
the worldwide energy consumption (2-3%). This paper argues their approach is explored in a case study, which analyses the
that until Cloud end-users have to pay for energy consumption sustainability aspects of a Skin Cancer Information System.
Copyright held by the author(s).
2
Their results suggest that SuSoftPro provides a method for whether we can identify challenges associated with defining,
considering and prioritising sustainability requirements. This formulating and realizing public policies, whether the chal-
raises the question of how should we maximise the positive lenges have analogs in RE for software intensive systems,
impact and minimise the negative impact across all sustain- and how RE techniques could help mitigate the identified
ability dimensions? public policy challenges. Furthermore, it considers whether RE
The paper presented a study with fourteen stakeholders techniques can be used to proactively identify possible public
and 23 high-level requirements were assigned to the relevant policy challenges during formulation and before enactment.
sustainability dimensions. Fuzzy rating scales were used by The investigated topics were big data algorithms that have
participants to assign relevance to each of these requirements. drawn sufficient attention to warrant public policy discussions,
Fuzzy ratings were used as the authors consider them to IT projects in support of some policy goal, social (e.g. free
be more precise in expressing stakeholder preferences that speech, critical thinking, gender issues, fake news, radical-
numerical ones. ism), privacy (e.g. location data, social media, children’s self-
Discussion: The workshop discussion around energy pro- determination), policy (e.g. cybersecurity, copyright, taxes,
filing and behavior change centered around 3 main points: housing), climate change (e.g. resilience, carbon emissions,
(i) incentivization to think about sustainability, (ii) prevalence energy, electric vehicles, pipelines), controlled substances (e.g.
of doomsday narrative versus a more in-depth exploration of state versus federal law, avoiding crime, licensing, taxes), and
transition stories, and (iii) observation that economic gains and equalization (e.g. income, taxes, resources, cost of living). The
losses are considered to be of prime importance (e.g. as drivers analysis identified a number of challenges that drew parallels
to lower one’s energy bill) but it is convenience that really in requirements engineering.
drives human behaviour, as humans are creatures of habit. Discussion: Much of the discussion was about more ex-
amples of the lack of analysis used in policy decisions. One
IV. K ARLSKRONA M ANIFESTO : S OFTWARE issue discussed at this session focused on the relevance of
R EQUIREMENT E NGINEERING G OOD P RACTICES the measurement scope referred to as the “Magnitude of
Unintended Consequences”. A local change measured locally
The Karlskrona Manifesto was incepted in 2014 and since
could or could not be felt globally, yet it will matter for the
then, the research group that remained steady around it con-
given locality; a change observed at one level of analysis could
ducted a number of studies with practitioners to investigate
have repercussions at another level. This raises the challenge
what their perceptions of sustainability were and how it
of how to measure the direct and indirect impact of decisions.
could support requirements engineering. This paper takes a
straightforward approach to mapping the principles to phases
of the software development lifecycle and recommends a few VI. A N E XPLORATION OF S USTAINABILITY T HINKING IN
practices for application of these principles. In addition, the R ESEARCH S OFTWARE E NGINEERING
paper presents a template for application of the best practices
This paper proposes an avenue for research that rethinks
and explains these using an illustrative example study. The
the development of research software from a sustainability
next step in this research is a planned confirmatory case
perspective. For this, the paper uses the analysis of a goal
study with application of the principles with a template to
model that explores the meaning of sustainability for the
an industrial setting.
domain of research software engineering. In order to get clarity
Discussion: The discussion session on the application of on the underlying values and to extract exemplary sustainabil-
the Karlskrona Manifesto touched a number of topics. One ity requirements, it revisits the sustainability reference model
promising approach suggested for use in future research was from 2013 by Penzenstadler and Femmer and instantiates it for
storytelling as a way to describe ‘how it’s done’ in addition the case example of two dedicated research software systems
to a best practice template. As examples of this, the agile from the field of Model-Driven Engineering, namely Henshin
story books about XP (by Kent Beck) were proposed. For and SiLift.
instance, the “XP Explained” book discusses how agile pro-
The exploration of the five dimensions leads to exemplary
cesses worked at Chrysler. It was also suggested to set up a
objectives for the two tools at hand that can be implemented
web portal that would show different examples from different
via activities and assessed via indicators. Next steps for this
case study systems. One of the questions to resolve (which
research are to implement some of identified activities for the
is outside of the scope of this particular piece of research) is
studied tools (i.e., Henshin and SiLift).
how to promote best practices as opposed to engaging into
Discussion: The discussion session topics for this paper
‘method wars’.
related to licensing (which can harm the community), and
Thinking of freely available materials for confirmatory case
the notion of ‘dependency hell’. This ‘hell’ poses a problem
studies, it was suggested that the SQL Lite OS project has a
for maintenance as it expects that the versions of particular
repository of requirements which could be useful for such a
libraries on which one’s software depends should be locked
study.
up. For future work, there was a recommendation to look at
Greg Wilson’s Software Carpentry for Replicable Software and
V. P UBLIC P OLICY C HALLENGES : A N RE P ERSPECTIVE to relate to the work of Dan Katz on the WSSSPE workshop
This paper analyzed the mass stream media around seven series and Jeffrey Carver’s efforts for a Sustainable Scientific
topics that were popular during the past 12 months. It assessed Software Institute in the US.
3
Figure 1. RE4SuSy 2018: Ahmed Alharti, Abram Hindle, Colin C. Venters, Timo Kehrer, and Birgit Penzenstadler.
VII. N EXT S TEPS A potential opportunity is to demonstrate empirically the un-
In the final session of the workshop the discussion focused sustainability of scientific software and link it to mechanisms
on the next steps for both the workshop in general and specific for sustainability profiling underpinned by the principles set
actions related to the papers presented during the day. Having out in the Karlskrona manifesto with software and requirement
established a strong and growing research community around engineering best practice.
the different aspects of sustainability and how to support them A final topic for discussion was how to embed sustainability
in requirements engineering the discussion centered on the thinking into the computer science and software engineering
challenge of growing the research community and the potential curriculum and the need to ingrain sustainability as the core
steps required to achieve growth. theme.