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Sustainability is a major concern for our society today. Software acts as a catalyst to support different business activities which have an impact on sustainability. Research from software engineering and other academic disciplines have proposed various software sustainability guidelines, tools, and methods to support software sustainability design in industry. However, there are still challenges on how to design and engineer sustainability into software products by software development practitioners in industry using those proposed sustainability guidelines and tools. The goal of this research is to seek understanding on what software sustainability means for software development practitioners and identify how to properly support engineering of sustainability into software design and development through academic research. Data were gathered and analyzed using grounded theory from workshop with different software development practitioners to seek their understanding on what sustainability means in their software systems. The results show economic and technical sustainability dimensions are the most important to software development practitioners for software sustainability. While the social sustainability dimension was not considered for software sustainability. The findings from this study indicates contrast in academia where all sustainability dimensions are treated as an important element to achieve software sustainability. Therefore, there is need for better collaboration between industry and academia to improve understanding of software sustainability and support effective sustainability engineering in software systems.
Context: It is impossible to imagine our everyday and professional lives without software. Consequently, software products, especially socio-technical systems, have more or less obvious impacts on almost all areas of our society. For this purpose, a group of scientists worldwide has developed the Sustainability Awareness Framework (SusAF) which examines the impacts on five interrelated dimensions: social, individual, environmental, economic, and technical. According to this framework, we should design software to maintain or improve the Sustainability Impacts. Designing for sustainability is a major challenge that can profoundly change the field of activity – particular for Software Engineers. Objectives: The aim of the thesis work is to analyze the current role of Software Engineers and relate it to Sustainability Impacts of Software Products in order to contribute to this paradigm shift. This should provide a basis for follow-up works. The question in which direction exactly the Software Engineer should develop and how exactly this path can be followed is still owed by the scientific community. Perhaps universities will have to adapt the curriculum in the training of Software Engineers, politics could possibly initiate support programs in the field of sustainability for software companies, or maybe software sustainability certifications could emerge. In any case, Software Engineers must adapt to the times and acquire the necessary knowledge, the skills and the competencies. Results: The results of the dissertation are a better understanding of the needed paradigm shift of Software Engineers and comeplement the SusAF that to better support sustainability design. The extended SusAF is intended for both training and corporate use.