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The Elephant in the Room - Educating Practitioners on Software Development for Sustainability
(2021)
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”.
Context: The Software Engineering process can be seen as a socio-technical activity that involves fulfilling one's role as part of a team. Accordingly, software products and services are the result of a specific collaboration between employees (and other stakeholders). In recent years, sustainability, which Requirements Engineers often paraphrase as the ability of a system to endure, is becoming part of the process and thus the responsibility of Software Engineers (SE) as well. Objectives: This study shines the spotlight on the role of the SE: their self-attribution and their awareness for sustainability. We interviewed 13 SEs to figure out how they perceive their own role and to which extent they implement the topic of sustainability in their daily work. By visualizing these two sides, it is possible to debate changes and their possible paths to benefit the Software Engineering process including sustainability design. Results: A discrepancy between the current role and the ideal role of SEs becomes visible. It is characterized in particular by dwelling on their “classic” or time-honored tasks as an executive force, such as coding. At the same time, they point out the still missing necessity of an interdisciplinary, from communication coined working method. According to our interviewees SEs are inefficiently involved in the design process. They do not sufficiently assume their responsibility for the software and its sustainability impacts.
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 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.