A social and technical sustainability requirements catalogue

Abstract

Climate change calls for action from all sectors of our global economy, including ICT. Therefore, it is important to change the way we develop software to address the challenges posed by sustainability. Our goal is to contribute with a reusable sustainability requirements catalogue that helps developers be aware of sustainability-related properties worth considering during software development. The information for this catalogue was gathered via a systematic mapping study, whose results were synthesised in feature models and then modelled using iStar for a more expressive and configurable representation. A qualitative evaluation of the catalogue’s readability, interest, utility, and usefulness by 50 participants from the domain, showed that around 79% of the respondents found the catalogue “Good” or “Very Good”. However, more than 5% of the expert participants found weaknesses regarding most of the evaluated questions and around 25% are neutral in their overall evaluation. This led us to evolve the initial version of the catalogue for the social and technical dimensions of sustainability to improve its completeness and usefulness. This is achieved by aligning the information gathered in the systematic mapping study with the well-established quality model of the ISO/IEC 25010:2011, as we expect most of the experts are familiar with those qualities and respective hierarchies. During this process, we found information that led us to propose two additional qualities that were not covered by the ISO standard: fairness and legislation. We applied this evolved version of the catalogue to the U-Bike project comparing the requirements elicited without the catalogue with those identified using the catalogue. The result suggests that new sustainability requirements were worth considering from a sustainability point of view, supporting the usefulness of the catalogue.