Implications of Sustainability Conceptions in Software Engineering & Development Practice
This workshop is part of the German Research Software Engineers (https://de-rse.org/de/index.html) track at this year’s Software Engineering Conference (https://se-2022.gi.de/) organized by the German Informatics Society (https://gi.de/).
The workshop facilitation is based on a trans-disciplinary review of sustainability frameworks and criteria developed for assessing the quality and sustainability of software, software projects and digital artifacts. The review reveled three major categories of sustainability frameworks relating to software and software engineering: Product-oriented, Procedural and Systemic sustainability frameworks. The workshop will be organized along the introduction of representative frameworks for each category, their respective sustainability dimensions, and criteria.
Product-oriented perspectives have the developed artifact as their main unit of analysis – the what that is developed – and range from software sustainability models (e.g Condori-Fernández et al. 2019), criteria aimed at assessing the quality of software (ISO-25010), assessment of codebases (Bugayenko 2015), and sustainability conceptions for digital artifacts (Digital Public Good Alliance 2021; Stuermer et al. 2017). Process-oriented (or procedural) sustainability conceptions focus on how software is developed and aim to integrate sustainability orientations with our work processes – the how of developing software. These range from manifests (Becker et al. 52015; Leitner 2019), over guidelines (Peters, Marc (IBM) et al. 28.09.21; Xu, Feiyu (SAP) et al. 2021; Naumann et al. 2011) to frameworks focusing only on social aspects – such as guidelines for collaborative software development (Berlin Code of Conduct Contributors 2021; Jacob und SFOSC Contributors 2020) - or environmental aspects – such as the resource efficiency of software in development and use (Kern et al. 2018; DE-UZ 215; Naumann et al. 2011). A third category of sustainability frameworks developed aim for the integration of multiple units of analysis into a systemic assessment – asking about who is developing what; or how is developed what – through including socio-economic aspects into their criteria (Anzt et al. 2020; Stuermer et al. 2017). The potential implications of the varying sustainability perspectives for everyday software engineering and development practices however seem yet dubious and pose significant challenges regarding their operationalization. Participants of this workshop will therefore leave with a better idea of this very complex muddle and how it relates to everyday software engineering activities at work, such as requirements analysis, design, software development or testing.
The group discussion will be organized around the maturity, applicability, and functionality of the identified frameworks with the aim to raise awareness and foster exchange of perspectives among participants. Participants are also encouraged to bring software they have deep knowledge about with them and introduce them for focusing discussions. Regarding the interest of the workshop participants the second half of the second session could also focus on an exchange about existing tools that support the analysis of single sustainability criteria or the management of sustainability criteria catalogs.
The workshop language is English, and the workshop will be held online on Tuesday, 22nd February, and is organized in two sessions. The first session will be from 9-10:30am and the second session will start at 11:00am and end at 12:30pm.
If you want to contribute your perspective on the relation of sustainability and software engineering, please do not hesitate to contact Malte Reißig by Email with your proposal (https://www.iass-potsdam.de/de/menschen/malte-reissig).
If you are interested in contributing to this workshop as an attendee – participation is free of charge - you can register using this form (https://pretix.eu/gi/se2022/) at the conference website.
