Addressing sustainability in the requirements engineering process: From elicitation to functional decomposition

Abstract

AbstractDue to the critical role of a software‐intensive system in society, software engineers have a responsibility to add sustainability as a goal while developing a software system. However, there is a lack of practical guidelines providing a tangible decomposition of the sustainability aspect. Moreover, there are limited quantifiable methods to support sustainable design and analysis. Therefore, we propose a systematic approach that allows software practitioners to accommodate sustainability concerns that are aligned with other software quality attributes to enhance sustainable development. By using the combination of a goal‐scenario‐based approach and feature modeling, sustainability requirements are elicited along with their functional compositions. Our approach is a comprehensive reference model that decomposes sustainability requirements, enabling analysis, support, and assessment of sustainability risk analysis and guiding the designer to construct a feature model as a system functional decomposition. From the conducted theoretical evaluation and empirical study, our proposed approach can derive more significant sustainability‐related requirements and key features by providing a practical guideline with the integration of well‐known methods to address sustainability in requirements engineering. With the help of the provided approach, we can solve more conflicting goals in different sustainability dimensions.