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Software industry awareness on green and sustainable software engineering: a state-of-the-practice survey

Published: 23 September 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Sustainable computing is a rapidly growing research area spanning several areas of computer science. In the software engineering field, the topic has received increasing attention in recent years, with several studies addressing a range of concerns. However, few studies have demonstrated the awareness of software practitioners about the underlying concepts of sustainability in the software development practice. In this effect, in this study, we aim to provide some evidence about the practitioners' perception about the adoption of sustainability in software development, under four main perspectives: economic, social, environmental and technical. To accomplish such a goal, we carried out a survey study with twenty-five software engineers involved in projects in different domains. The yielded results indicate an overall lack of knowledge about the topic, in particular regarding the concepts about sustainable software, although it is a common understanding that sustainability should be treated as a quality attribute and should support the interaction between sustainability and the software development life cycle phases. Among the observed perspectives, the respondents indicate that the technical dimension is the most relevant and explored so far. This study contributes to the field with initial evidence and can be seen as a first step towards establishing a common understanding about how the software industry is receptive to the use of sustainability concepts in software development practices.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
SBES '19: Proceedings of the XXXIII Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering
September 2019
583 pages
ISBN:9781450376518
DOI:10.1145/3350768
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • SBC: Sociedade Brasileira de Computação

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 23 September 2019

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Author Tags

  1. Empirical Study
  2. Survey
  3. Sustainable Software Engineering

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SBES 2019

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SBES '19 Paper Acceptance Rate 67 of 153 submissions, 44%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 147 of 427 submissions, 34%

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Selection and Prediction of Sustainable Software Test Bed for Sustainable Test EnvironmentImpact of Climate Change on Mental Health and Well-Being10.4018/979-8-3693-2177-5.ch006(82-98)Online publication date: 24-May-2024
  • (2024)The Brazilian Practices for Handling Sustainability in Software Engineering: a Replicated SurveyProceedings of the XXIII Brazilian Symposium on Software Quality10.1145/3701625.3701668(298-308)Online publication date: 5-Nov-2024
  • (2024)Do Generative AI Tools Ensure Green Code? An Investigative StudyProceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Responsible AI Engineering10.1145/3643691.3648588(52-55)Online publication date: 16-Apr-2024
  • (2024)Building Up Green Software Life Cycle Model2024 10th International Conference on ICT for Sustainability (ICT4S)10.1109/ICT4S64576.2024.00012(20-28)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2024
  • (2023)More sustainable artificial intelligence systems through stakeholder involvement?GAIA - Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society10.14512/gaia.32.S1.1032:1(64-70)Online publication date: 13-Mar-2023
  • (2023)Current Challenges and Barriers in Sustainable Web Design: A Qualitative StudyProceedings of Mensch und Computer 202310.1145/3603555.3608529(375-379)Online publication date: 3-Sep-2023
  • (2023)Assessing the Impact of Refactoring Energy-Inefficient Code Patterns on Software Sustainability: An Industry Case StudyProceedings of the 38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1109/ASE56229.2023.00205(1825-1827)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2023
  • (2023)Towards a Knowledge Base of Common Sustainability Weaknesses in Green Software DevelopmentProceedings of the 38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1109/ASE56229.2023.00204(1718-1720)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2023
  • (2023)BERT-Based Approach for Greening Software Requirements Engineering Through Non-Functional RequirementsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2023.331779811(103001-103013)Online publication date: 2023
  • (2023)Exploring Factors Affecting the Adoption of Green Process Management Model in the Software Industry: Progress Towards Sustainability and CircularityCircular Economy Strategies and the UN Sustainable Development Goals10.1007/978-981-99-3083-8_16(489-518)Online publication date: 22-Aug-2023
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