Investigating Software Standards: A Lens of Sustainability for Software Crowdsourcing

Abstract

Inevitably, the time has come that necessitates software systems to have long lasting social impact and environmental friendliness. Although sustainability related to environmental and social aspects have been well versed in the literature, software sustainability, for the way of development and as final product for use, is still not mature enough. With the increasing role of software crowdsourcing, a new working architecture for software development, in global software development (GSD) settings, has emerged challenges regarding sustainable software development and software sustainability, which are still to be elucidated. Software standards and models exist to assist co-located and global software development; however, seismic changes in the working architecture of software development as software crowdsourcing are highlighting a risk of software failure. Recently, statistics showed that only 30% of projects are successful, whereas 50% encounter challenges and the remaining 20% are absolute failures that implicate a challenge toward software success and its sustainability. This posits questions of how many IEEE and international standard organization standards exist that cover the sustainability aspects in particular to software development and how in-depth the development practices are addressing sustainable aspects in software crowdsourcing? Thus, the aim of this paper is to examine the IEEE software standards with a lens of sustainability to software crowdsourcing. After reviewing the existing IEEE standards related to sustainability, it has been observed that few standards exist which have discussed the importance of sustainability on an abstract level (energy and examining environmental influence by the computers) in software development. Moreover, standards are focusing less attention toward the sustainability of software development in the presence of new envision toward software crowdsourcing. Thus, a lack of any guideline toward sustainable software crowdsourcing is highlighted as one of the limitations in the software standards. This paper contributes to the GSD industry in two folds, first by laying down the importance and theoretical association on and around sustainable crowdsourcing, and second by highlighting that the IEEE standards, inadequacy toward the suppressing phenomena of sustainability in software crowdsourcing, if addressed adequately, can minimize the ripple effect toward software failure.