Lessons Learned from Developing a Sustainability Awareness Framework for Software Engineering Using Design Science
Journal article, 2024

To foster a sustainable society within a sustainable environment, we must dramatically reshape our work and consumption activities, most of which are facilitated through software. Yet, most software engineers hardly consider the effects on the sustainability of the IT products and services they deliver. This issue is exacerbated by a lack of methods and tools for this purpose. Despite the practical need for methods and tools that explicitly support consideration of the effects that IT products and services have on the sustainability of their intended environments, such methods and tools remain largely unavailable. Thus, urgent research is needed to understand how to design such tools for the IT community properly. In this article, we describe our experience using design science to create the Sustainability Awareness Framework (SusAF), which supports software engineers in anticipating and mitigating the potential sustainability effects during system development. More specifically, we identify and present the challenges faced during this process. The challenges that we have faced and addressed in the development of the SusAF are likely to be relevant to others who aim to create methods and tools to integrate sustainability analysis into their IT products and services development. Thus, the lessons learned in SusAF development are shared for the benefit of researchers and other professionals who design tools for that end.

IT products

IT services

sustainability analysis

Author

Stefanie Betz

Furtwangen University (HFU)

Birgit Penzenstadler

Software Engineering 1

Leticia Duboc

University Ramon Llull

Ruzanna Chitchyan

University of Bristol

S. A. Kocak

Vector Institute

Ian Brooks

University of the West of England

Shola Oyedeji

Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology (LUT)

Jari Porras

Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology (LUT)

Norbert Seyff

University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland

Colin C. Venters

University of Huddersfield

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology

1049-331X (ISSN) 15577392 (eISSN)

Vol. 33 5 136

Driving Forces

Sustainable development

Subject Categories

Environmental Management

Software Engineering

Computer Science

DOI

10.1145/3649597

More information

Latest update

6/24/2024