Sustainability has become a cross-disciplinary research topic in the face of pressing, complex global challenges. DIY (Do-It-Yourself) Software Development, End-User Development (EUD), and Low-Code Development (LCD) are empowering non-programmers to design, develop, and maintain software. These paradigms use techniques such as visual programming or natural language programming to abstract beyond text-based program code. Beginning with a case study that draws a connection between DIY software development and sustainability through digital transformation, this position paper examines some of the broader sustainability implications in the areas of both DIY and software development in general, and argues whether or not they are applicable or adaptable to LCD. The preliminary conclusion is that, despite some challenges, LCD can draw from both fields, and that LCD can be used as a lever to promote sustainability.
In a recent case study on the digital transformation of the global energy company Shell, Carroll and
Maher [
Notably, in this case study, there is a link between sustainability and DIY software development. Shell recognizes that digitization “will be key for decarbonizing the energy supply,” and that the company’s citizen development program plays an important role in digital transformation. This raises the question of whether there are other implications between sustainability and DIY software development (or EUD/LCD, see below), where to uncover them, and how to explore them.
In an attempt to explore the similarities and diferences between End-User Development (EUD) and
Low-Code Development (LCD), Schenkenfelder et al. [
The above descriptions confirm a certain similarity or overlap between the concepts of EUD, LCD, and DIY software development. And since the term Low-Code is used in the industry-academia collaborations in which the author is involved, he will also use it in the context of this paper, recognizing that for practical work in such collaborations, both EUD, LCD, and DIY software development, either alone or in combination, can help achieve the goal of empowering non-programmers.
This position paper aims to uncover and explore the intersection between LCD and sustainability by reviewing relevant areas and how they relate to sustainability in general, and then to argue whether or not these implications can be applied or adapted to LCD. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Related areas and their implications are presented in Section 2 (DIY) and Section 3 (Software Development). Section 4 discusses the results, namely whether and how these implications apply to LCD, followed by conclusions and an outline of future work (Section 5). And since this position paper is intended as a contribution to an interactive and engaging session to further elaborate on the topic, some of the implications may require more imagination to follow, and others less.
The area of DIY in general is considered relevant because of the notion of DIY software development described in Section 1. The idea is to uncover and explore sustainability implications from this area that also apply to the more specific concept of DIY software development. The author is not a DIY expert, nor does he have any knowledge of the relevant scientific communities, conferences, or journals. An LLM prompt for the five most frequently cited conference papers or journal articles on DIY and sustainability returned only a list of hypothetical references (see Appendix A.1). A search was finally conducted on Google Scholar and ResearchGate, using the keywords DIY, do-it-yourself, sustainability, and combinations thereof.
In 15 interviews with DIY practitioners, Salvia [
In his review of the literature and actual developments, Hoftijzer [6] notes that DIY, which he sees as a convergence of production and consumption, has been made possible by technological developments that now empower end users to design and develop products. He emphasizes the positive nature of user design as a sustainable contrast to the use and disposal of consumer products. However, Hoftijzer also points out that the manufacturing technologies for unique user products are not yet mature in terms of their use of natural resources and the potential abundance of product iterations.
De Waal and Smal [7] present DIY as a pathway to sustainability through the case study of a Johannesburg-based clothing label. Their framework of DIY motivators is based on two main categories, namely “Product and Service Evaluation” and “Identity Enhancement.” The first category, including customization, diversity, and quality of a product as well as economic benefits, deals with the production itself, while the second, including empowerment and fulfillment by creating, belonging to a community, and uniqueness in identity, deals with the DIYers themselves, and how they enhance their identity. Expanding on the idea of DIY, they propose a new approach called DI4Y2 (Doing-It-For-Yourself-AndOthers), which not only meets the needs of the individual, but also contributes to “the greater good of the environment and all living beings,” further promoting sustainability.
The literature reviewed in this section is part of an ongoing research initiative3 focused on how software engineering practice addresses sustainability, with the goal of identifying influencing factors, deficiencies, and best practices. These papers are considered relevant because LCD is a subset of software development. This allows the author to speculate on whether or not some of the general ideas are applicable or adaptable to LCD.
Paech et al. [8] recognize that sustainability is becoming an increasingly relevant aspect of software development, but identifying sustainability efects during requirements engineering is still a challenging task. In an exploratory study, they use Generative Pretrained Transformers (GPTs) to automatically identify sustainability efects and conclude that GPT-4o is “capable of generating relevant sustainability efects.” In addition, these efects can be generated in seconds, but at the cost of high power consumption. These generated efects were found to be valid and plausible, hallucinations were not observed. Limitations in the use of GPT-4o are its non-determinism and the inability to rank efects by relevance.
With the adoption of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD)4, the EU requires companies to report on what they consider to be the risks and opportunities associated with social and environmental issues, as well as the impact of their activities in these areas. Mazak-Huemer et al. [9] present SustainScrum to systematically address sustainability throughout the development process. Specifically, SustainScrum is a customized Scrum process that considers sustainability in the backlog, user stories, and development phases, and provides quantitative sustainability indicators, including a Sustainability Sprint KPI and a Sustainability Product KPI report. Interestingly, when evaluating SustainScrum with open-source data, they found a number of challenges that need further attention. While answering sustainability-related questions (SusAF, see below) is time-consuming in itself, it is often necessary to train the development team to understand sustainability in the first place, including EU regulations. Automating this sustainability assessment is another complex and laborious task. 3https://se.jku.at/sustainability-in-software-engineering/, last accessed: 2025-04-01 4https://finance.ec.europa.eu/capital-markets-union-and-financial-markets/company-reporting-and-auditing/companyreporting/corporate-sustainability-reporting_en, last accessed: 2025-04-01
Bambazek and Groher [10] report on the integration of the Sustainability Awareness Framework (SusAF) into an undergraduate software engineering course and how the students were able to identify sustainability efects. The SusAF is a guideline with questions to identify potential sustainability efects with social, individual, environmental, economic, and technical dimensions. In addition, each identified efect is categorized as immediate, enabling, or structural to indicate its magnitude. The authors observed that all teams found potential sustainability efects, most of which were positive, resulting in a variety of issues and illustrating the impact of software on an organization’s sustainability goals. Bambazek and Groher also pointed out that the students did this without any prior theoretical or practical knowledge of SusAF.
Groher and Weinreich [11] conducted an interview study with 10 software project team leaders to understand how sustainability is perceived by practitioners. Specifically, the participants were asked about their definition of sustainability in software development and its importance, potential influencing factors, current problems, and measures to improve sustainability. They found that technical and organizational sustainability issues are more important than economic ones, while environmental aspects are not considered at all. They identified business goals, requirements, technologies, and people as influencing factors. In terms of shortcomings such as lack of documentation and knowledge sharing, the identified sustainability strategies are very general and dificult to distinguish from general quality assurance measures.
Low-Code Development Platforms (LCDPs), which provide the tools to build software using the
LowCode approach, ofer a low barrier to entry for reuse and repair compared to traditional software
development, and therefore could be a great lever to extend the life of software while addressing
other aspects of sustainability. Categorizing Low-Code users by motivation and designing systems
accordingly to support a sustainable balance between problem-solving capabilities (doers) and facilitating
passion (creators) could be another way to promote sustainability [
The idea of DIY vs. SIY also applies to LCD [
Again, using AI to automate certain aspects of sustainability [8] requires careful consideration due to its high power consumption. However, incorporating such an AI capability into the design of an LCDP would only consume energy once, rather than several times when building software from scratch. On the other hand, GPTs have remarkable capabilities that could also help improve sustainability. Whether automated or manual, systematically addressing and capturing sustainability helps identify its efects [9, 10, 11]. With regard to SustainScrum, it remains unclear whether this process model can be applied directly to LCD or whether it needs to be adapted. However, applying a development process to LCD may be contradictory in the first place, since Low-Code promises a shallow learning curve.
It is interesting to note that papers from both areas discuss the fact that sustainability can be associated
with certain pitfalls that undermine its original intention, such as higher cost per item [
This position paper first reflects on a case study of DIY (Do-It-Yourself) software development and how it relates to sustainability through digital transformation. The author then argues that DIY software development, EUD and LCD have a large overlap. Having established this common ground, the paper continues to uncover and explore whether there are other or more detailed sustainability implications than digital transformation. This is done by examining the related fields of DIY and software development in general and how they address sustainability. Finally, the author speculates on whether or not these general ideas and approaches can be applied or adapted to LCD, finding that LCD can draw from both fields and, more importantly, that LCD can be used to leverage sustainability.
Immediate future work aims to confirm these preliminary findings. First, by aligning the measures found in the literature and the ideas presented above with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, a more comprehensive and generalizable baseline could be established (see Appendix A.2, for example). Then, a systematic extension of the literature reviewed would provide more insights and a broader range of answers to the original question. Finally, an empirical validation of the claims made with respect to the intersection of sustainability and LCD through their use in actual LCD projects could strengthen the existing body of knowledge.
The research reported in this paper has been partly funded by the Federal Ministry for Climate Action, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation and Technology (BMK), the Federal Ministry for Labour and Economy (BMAW), and the State of Upper Austria in the frame of the SCCH competence center INTEGRATE (FFG grant no. 892418) in the COMET - Competence Centers for Excellent Technologies Programme managed by Austrian Research Promotion Agency FFG.
During the preparation of this work, the author used DeepL Write and DeepL Translate in order to: Text Translation, Improve writing style, and Grammar and spelling check. Further, the author used Llama 3.3 70B (hosted in-house) in order to: Generate literature review (results discarded, see Appendix A.1) and Drafting content (see Appendix A.2). After using these tools/services, the author reviewed and edited the content as needed and takes full responsibility for the publication’s content. [6] J. Hoftijzer, Sustainability by do-it-yourself product design: User design opposing mass consumption, in: P. Israsena, J. Tangsantikul, D. Durling (Eds.), Research: Uncertainty Contradiction Value - DRS International Conference 2012, Bangkok, Thailand, 2012. URL: https: //dl.designresearchsociety.org/drs-conference-papers/drs2012/researchpapers/52. [7] D. De Waal, D. Smal, Re-thinking do-it-yourself: An ontological approach to sustainability in fashion design praxis, DIY, Alternative Cultures & Society 2 (2024) 191–206. doi:10.1177/ 27538702241238775. [8] B. Paech, P. Kaiser, P. Bambazek, I. Groher, N. Seyf, Exploring generative pretrained transformers to support sustainability efect identification - a research preview, in: A. Hess, A. Susi (Eds.), Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality, Springer Nature Switzerland, Cham, 2025, pp. 226–234. [9] A. Mazak-Huemer, M. Vierhauser, I. Groher, Sustainscrum: integrating sustainability assessment in a tailored scrum process for computing quantitative sustainability indicators, Software and Systems Modeling (2025). URL: https://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10270-025-01266-5. doi:10. 1007/s10270-025-01266-5. [10] P. Bambazek, I. Groher, Integrating the sustainability awareness framework in undergraduate software engineering education, in: D. Mendez, A. Moreira, J. Horkof, T. Weyer, M. Daneva, M. Unterkalmsteiner, S. Bühne, J. Hehn, B. Penzenstadler, N. Condori-Fernández, O. Dieste, R. Guizzardi, K. M. Habibullah, A. Perini, A. Susi, S. Abualhaija, C. Arora, D. Dell’Anna, A. Ferrari, S. Ghanavati, F. Dalpiaz, J. Steghöfer, A. Rachmann, J. Gulden, A. Müller, M. Beck, D. Birkmeier, A. Herrmann, P. Mennig, K. Schneider (Eds.), Joint Proceedings of REFSQ-2024 Workshops, Doctoral Symposium, Posters & Tools Track, and Education and Training Track. Colocated with REFSQ 2024, number 3672 in CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Aachen, 2024. URL: https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3672/EuT-paper1.pdf. [11] I. Groher, R. Weinreich, An interview study on sustainability concerns in software development projects, in: 2017 43rd Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA), IEEE, Vienna, Austria, 2017, p. 350–358. URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/ 8051370/. doi:10.1109/SEAA.2017.70.