For many practitioners, considering sustainability during a software development project is a challenge. The Sustainability Awareness Framework (SusAF) is a tool for thinking through short, medium- and long-term impacts of socio-technical systems on its surrounding environment. While SusAF has been used by several companies, is not widely adopted in industry yet. In this Vision Paper, we discuss the options for extending the reach of SusAF and what it would take to evolve SusAF into a (de-facto) standard
Sustainability has been a topic at the REFSQ Conference since 2012 with the first workshop
on Requirements Engineering for Sustainable Systems (RE4SuSy) [
Why and how does such a framework potentially help with sustainability impacts? Not
every practitioner has a background in sustainability. When asked, many practitioners feel not
adequately educated to consider sustainability in IT system development [
Challenge We envision a wider application of the framework and sense that there is still a certain apprehension about championing sustainability and moderating a SusAF workshop when one does not feel “expert enough”.
Objective Our main objective is to have impact with SusAF as it seems to be useful according
to the feedback we have received [
In this paper, we discuss the options we see and highlight the one we think is best. We look forward to discussing these options further with the community.
Looking at the options, one could argue that there is a high chance that SusAF gets applied once it becomes a formal standard. Let us discuss this option in more detail. Formal Standard What would it take for SusAF to become a standard? First, we would have to go through a national standardization body e.g. BSI in the UK, which may require potentially years of lobbying in a committee. If there is a suitable committee already in place, it might be possible to convince them to sponsor the framework in becoming a standard. However, such committees sometimes run for years and then die. Some standardization bodies are mainly made up of industry players that push what they are already using. How to convince a standardization body that SusAF is worthwhile to become a standard?
Alternatively, one might attempt to go directly to IEEE, which would eventually lead to
an ISO standard. This alternative could also take years. Moreover, even once SusAF is an
1A framework is "a structure for a topic area that collects elements of the topic area and relates them to each
other. A framework is semi complete and must be supplemented and/or adapted context-specifically for a concrete
application.” [
That leads us to the question: Is it actually worthwhile to aim at making a standard out of SusAF? We have come to the conclusion that this should not be our primary goal. It is a high risk endeavour where, at the end, we still would not have achieved our goal of making SusAF widely adopted by industry. Furthermore, there is some urgency in our matter. We would like the adoption of SusAF by industry to start right away.
So, what about other options?
De-Facto Standard Looking at study on standards in RE [
One disadvantage might be that a de-facto standard is easier to change and thus output is less comparable (e.g. for a customer comparing diferent products or features). Also, industry adopts much easier standards than establishing de-facto standards so the spread might be larger when having a standard. Another disadvantage might be that if politics impose regulations to make software engineering companies accountable for the sustainability impacts of their products, a standard might be easier for companies to implement and to perform assessments than a de-facto standard. Finally, a standard goes through a very rigid evaluation process so the outcome possible has a better quality than a de-facto standard.
However, what would it take to establish SusAF as a so-called de-facto standard? We have
discussed this question among the authors of this paper and have derived the following list of
actions:
• Spread the word: We would need to actively promote SusAF. Companies need to know
that it is out there and that it is available to them.
• Provide evidence that it works: Potential adopters need to know that it works so we need
to provide evidence not only by conducting further case studies, but also by inviting
successful adopters to share their lessons learned.
• Provide evidence of demand: An increasing number of clients are requiring specific
sustainability outcomes from software systems and suppliers. An example is UK
Government’s policy requirements stated in Greening government: ICT and digital services
strategy 2020-2025 [
What do we need to do next? We have set ourselves the goal to foster the following activities: • Provide guidance on identifying a set of suitable stakeholders for the SusAF workshop.
You either need knowledgeable people in the room or a moderator with some background in sustainability. • Provide guidance on how to tailor SusAF for specific development processes (e.g., agile development frameworks such as Scrum) and specific types of systems (e.g., cyber-physical systems or autonomous systems) • Provide guidance on how to relate SusAF to other widely adopted frameworks (e.g., SDG,
GRI, relevant ISO standards). • Provide a training course for practitioners on sustainability that specifically addresses the needs of software engineering to ofer a more efective alternative to "general purpose" sustainability trainings already available.
Through impact and ultimate adoption, SusAF can become a de-facto standard, and then industry partners can help it go through a committee of a standardization body and become an oficial standard.
We have discussed diferent options on how to continue our work on SusAF and would like to continue this discussion with diferent stakeholders. These include experts in the field of standardization, researchers and, last but not least, practitioners. We anticipate that a broad discussion, including the opinions of these diferent stakeholders on how to proceed, will make it more likely that we can achieve our goal of fostering the adoption of SusAF in industry and creating a framework that can have a lasting impact.
Part of this work has been funded by the Area of Advance at Chalmers under project number 37460087, and the Dept. of Research and Universities (Catalonia Gov.) under Grant Ref. 2021 SGR 01396.