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
Digital transformation is now reaching into topics like End-of-life Care, Funeral Culture, and Coping with Grief. Those developments are inevitably accompanied by the growing challenge to design IT systems that are appropriate and helpful for the stakeholders involved. Our aim in this paper is to further introduce the rather new combined research field of Socioinformatics and Thanatology (the scientific study of death and dying) and to present it with the first results on which requirements to consider for the design of digital tools within ‘Thanatopractice’. By using Participatory Design and the Sustainability Awareness Framework (SusAF) in the context of three workshops on socio-technical systems (Online Pastoral Care, Virtual Graveyards, and AI Memory Avatars), we want to sensitize software practitioners to the multidimensional impacts of their products and services in a field, which the participants in the workshops often described as “highly sensitive”.
Year after year, software engineers celebrate new achievements in the field of AI. At the same time, the question about the impacts of AI on society remains insufficiently answered in terms of a comprehensive technology assessment. This article aims to provide software practitioners with a theoretically grounded and practically tested approach that enables an initial understanding of the potential multidimensional impacts. Subsequently, the results form the basis for discussions on AI software requirements. The approach is based on the Sustainability Awareness Framework (SusAF) and Participatory Design. We conducted three workshops on different AI topics: 1. Autonomous Driving, 2. Music Composition, and 3. Memory Avatars. Based on the results of the workshops we conclude that a two-level approach should be adopted: First, a broad one that includes a diverse selection of stakeholders and overall impact analysis. Then, in a second step, specific approaches narrowing down the stakeholders and focusing on one or few impact areas.
The Elephant in the Room - Educating Practitioners on Software Development for Sustainability
(2021)
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations focus on key issues for the transformation of our world towards sustainability. We argue for stronger integration of the SDGs into requirements and software engineering and for the creation of methods and tools that support the analysis of potential effects of software systems on sustainability in general and on SDGs in particular. To demonstrate one way of undertaking this integration, we report on how the Sustainability Awareness Framework (SusAF -- a tool developed by the authors of this paper) can be mapped to the SDGs, allowing the identification of potential effects of software systems on sustainability and on the SDGs. This mapping exercise demonstrates that it is possible for requirements engineers working on a specific system to consider that system's impact with respect to SDGs.