Sustainability Competencies in Research Strategy for Software Engineering: Personal Experience and Best Practices

Book chapter, 2024

This chapter provides an experience report with a particular focus on lessons learned emerging from onboarding BSc, MSc, and PhD students for empirical research projects and supervising them to design their own. With the objectives to (1) prepare students as agents of change that master the sustainability competencies and (2) teach students good research methods and proper empirical research design, I provide a list of supervision and onboarding scenarios that have taught me what works and what does not work so well and how to improve. As guidance, I focus on exercises that can be used in teaching at all levels and supervision scenarios that are more useful for PhD student mentoring. The chapter discusses aspects related to didactics and pedagogy, shows how to tie the ABC of software engineering research in synergistically with the sustainability competencies framework and positions the work within the leverage points for sustainability. It concludes with recommendations and takeaways for best practices as well as teaching materials and reflections on ethics.