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Towards a common understanding of sustainable software development

Published: 05 October 2022 Publication History

Abstract

The underlying principles of Sustainable Software Engineering are a core set of competencies Software Engineers need for defining, building, and running sustainable software applications. However, despite its importance, recently published studies have shown that Software Engineers have not reached a common and clear understanding of Sustainable Software Development (SSD). Consequently, it might be challenging to understand the value of the principles behind sustainability and how Software Engineers should apply them in practice. Therefore, the first step is to promote a field characterization to mitigate such effects to bridge such a gap. This paper reports on qualitative data analysis to leverage the sustainability principles through the support of the Grounded Theory method. We conducted this study using unstructured data retrieved from a systematic mapping study on sustainable software engineering and a survey applied in the software industry. To achieve the principles, we considered five critical dimensions: economic, social, individual, environmental, and technical. The key results are: (i) technical, environmental, and social concerns are present in all software development life-cycle (SDLC) phases; (ii) software engineers should consider sustainability requirements in the early SDLC phases; (iii) there is a need for stakeholder engagement focused on sustainability; (iv) software quality requirements support the development of sustainable software; and (v) sustainable concerns could generate trade-offs in the project. The yielded results might trigger further discussions around the SSD’s underlying principles and concepts and serve as a basis for the research community to identify models, techniques, and tools to support SSD.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
SBES '22: Proceedings of the XXXVI Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering
October 2022
457 pages
ISBN:9781450397353
DOI:10.1145/3555228
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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Published: 05 October 2022

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Author Tags

  1. Empirical Software Engineering
  2. Grounded Theory
  3. Sustainable Software Engineering

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SBES 2022
SBES 2022: XXXVI Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering
October 5 - 7, 2022
Virtual Event, Brazil

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View all
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  • (2024)A Collection of Standards-based Recommendations for Sustainable, Social, Accessible Robots and Systems in Public Spaces - A Systematic Review and Derivation of Unified Equality Requirement DescriptionsProceedings of the 12th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction10.1145/3687272.3688294(305-313)Online publication date: 24-Nov-2024
  • (2024)Sustainability as a Starting Point in Software Development2024 50th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA)10.1109/SEAA64295.2024.00046(252-255)Online publication date: 28-Aug-2024
  • (2024)Towards sustainable software systemsInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2024.107411169:COnline publication date: 2-Jul-2024
  • (2023)Exploring Software Development Waste and Lean Approach in Green Perspective2023 International Conference on Electrical Engineering and Informatics (ICEEI)10.1109/ICEEI59426.2023.10346869(1-6)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2023

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