Models of Sustainable Software: A Scoping Review

Jakub Swacha

doi:10.3390/su14010551

Abstract

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) play a double role in the strife for sustainable development goals, as both an enabler of green solutions and a cause of excessive consumption. While the primary focus of sustainability-related research is on the hardware aspect of ICT, its software aspect also deserves attention. In order for the notion of green and sustainable software to become widespread among practitioners, models are needed, both to be used as a reference on how to develop sustainable software, and to check whether given software or its development process is sustainable. In this paper, we present the results of a scoping review of literature on sustainable software models, based on 41 works extracted from an initial set of 178 query results from four bibliographic data providers. The relevant literature is mapped using five categories (model scope, purpose, covered sustainability aspects, verification or validation, and the economic category of the country of research), allowing us to identify recent trends and research gaps, which can be addressed in future work.

Highlights

In the context of RQ1, we identify two types of sustainable software models in the literature: those pertaining to software product [7,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33], and those pertaining to software development process6 [31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55]
Answering RQ2, we identify two basic purposes of the presented models: providing a reference and guidelines for those participating in various roles in the software development life cycle in order to help them attain the qualities of sustainable software products and processes [7,16,17,18,19,22,23,25,26,27,28,30,31,32,33,34,36,38,46,49,53], and providing methods, measures, and tools that can be applied to verify whether given software products and processes can be considered as green or sustainable [17,19,20,21,24,26,29,30,32,33,35,37,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,47,48,50,51,52,54,55]
The key contribution of the reported research is the mapping of existing literature on green and sustainable software models using five categories

Summary

Introduction

Citation: Swacha, J. Models of Sustainable Software: A ScopingReview. Sustainability 2022, 14, 551.https://doi.org/10.3390/su14010551Academic Editor: Fabrizio D’AscenzoReceived: 14 December 2021Accepted: 31 December 2021Published: 5 January 2022Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.Copyright: Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/

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