Sustainable Software Engineering Research Articles

The Trailer of the ACM 2030 Roadmap for Software Engineering

The landscape of software engineering has dramatically changed. The recent advances in AI, the new opportunities of quantum computing, and the new challenges of sustainability and cyber security upset the software engineering research prospective. The 2030 SE-Roadmap special issue of ACM TOSEM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology gives a 360° view of the research challenges of the 30ties with a thorough editorial, four roadmap papers from the ACM TOSEM editorial board, and over 30 peer-reviewed papers from the research community. This paper previews the main content of the 2030 roadmap special issue with a report from the 2030 Software Engineering Roadmap workshop, co-located with ACM SIGSOFT FSE Foundations of Software engineering on July 15th and 16th, 2024 in Porto de Galinhas, Brazil, that spotlighted the software engineering research horizon to feed ideas into the ACM TOSEM special issue. The paper discusses the new challenges to software engineering that emerged in the SE2030 workshop: AI for software engineering, software engineering by and for humans, sustainable software engineering, automatic programming, cyber security, validation and verification, and quantum software engineering.

Sustainable software engineering—A contribution puzzle of different teams in large IT organizations

AbstractIT sustainability is becoming more and more important within the digitalization journey. It is more than green coding or the usage of power‐efficient hardware – it needs a holistic approach to leverage the potentials end‐to‐end in the software life‐cycle. The overall value stream within the IT organization is subject to sustainability alignment. This holistic alignment demands the engagement of different teams in large IT organizations. This article identifies the contributions of typical team stakeholders and evaluates their sustainability software engineering (SSE) contributions. This includes demand, architecture, design, implementation, operation, and usage. As an IT organization focuses on more than just software, the term sustainable IT engineering (SIE) fits better with the scope of organizational sustainability. The proposed approaches are presented based on instantiations within the Volkswagen Group IT.

Tools, techniques, and trends in sustainable software engineering: A critical review of current practices and future directions

The quest for sustainability has extended its reach into the realm of software engineering, prompting an exploration of tools, techniques, and emerging trends to mitigate the environmental impact of software development and operation. This review provides a critical review of current practices and future directions in sustainable software engineering. In recent years, the software industry has recognized the need to address the environmental footprint of software systems, considering factors such as energy consumption, resource utilization, and carbon emissions. Consequently, a plethora of tools and techniques have emerged to support sustainable software development processes. These range from energy-efficient programming languages and frameworks to eco-friendly software architectures and design patterns. Moreover, methodologies such as Green Software Engineering (GSE) and Sustainable Software Development (SSD) have gained traction, emphasizing the integration of sustainability considerations throughout the software development lifecycle. By adopting practices like green requirements engineering, energy-aware testing, and eco-design principles, organizations can optimize their software systems for reduced environmental impact without compromising functionality or performance. Furthermore, trends in sustainable software engineering extend beyond traditional development practices. The rise of cloud computing, edge computing, and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies presents both challenges and opportunities for sustainability. Techniques such as serverless computing and containerization offer potential benefits in terms of resource efficiency and scalability, while also introducing new considerations regarding data center energy consumption and electronic waste management. Looking ahead, the future of sustainable software engineering is marked by innovation and collaboration. Emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain hold promise for optimizing resource allocation, enhancing energy efficiency, and fostering transparency in sustainability efforts. Additionally, interdisciplinary collaboration between software engineers, environmental scientists, and policymakers will be essential in shaping a more sustainable digital ecosystem. The journey towards sustainable software engineering involves a multifaceted approach encompassing tools, techniques, and ongoing adaptation to evolving trends. By critically evaluating current practices and embracing future directions, the software industry can contribute to a more environmentally responsible and resilient future.

S3EF-HBCAs: Secure and Sustainable Software Engineering Framework for Healthcare Blockchain Applications.

Blockchain applications in healthcare have grown rapidly. They include record-keeping, clinical trials, medical supply chains, patient monitoring, etc., where blockchain characteristics are needed to improve safety, privacy, and security. Blockchain technology is one of the most significant disruptive technologies today. However, Porru et al.1 reported that it lacks processes, tools, and techniques. Therefore, this paper provides a systematic framework for a secure and sustainable software engineering framework for healthcare blockchain applications (S3EF-HBCA). S3EF-HBCA is a significant contribution that includes requirements engineering for healthcare, business process modeling for healthcare, domain modeling for healthcare, a reference architecture for healthcare, and validation by a case study on electronic healthcare record management system (EHR), and simulation with business process modeling notation (BPMN) tools. The simulation shows it has taken 10.45 min to process 100 instances of real-time data and service requests. The overall result shows encouragement regarding process, tools, standards, and testing.

Sustainable software engineering: Reflections on advances in research and practice

Sustainable software engineering: Reflections on advances in research and practice

Factors influencing sustainability aspects in crowdsourced software development: A systematic literature review

AbstractCrowdsource software development has become more and more popular in recent years in the software industry. Crowdsourcing is an open‐call technique for outsourcing tasks to a broad and undefined crowd. Crowdsourcing provides numerous advantages including reduced costs, fast project completion, talent identification, diversity of solutions, top‐quality, and access to problem‐solving creativity. Despite of the benefits gained from crowdsourcing, there are numerous issues like lack of experienced workers, lack of confidentiality, copyright issues, software sustainability, and so forth. There is also less focus on the long‐term sustainability of software development because of new ideas emerging in crowdsourcing software development. Furthermore, in literature, lack of guidelines towards sustainable software crowdsourcing is highlighted as one of the limitations in the software standards. This study aims to identify the factors that influence sustainability aspects in crowdsourced software development. We have conducted a systematic literature review for identification of these factors. In this paper, we present findings of the systematic literature review in the form of a list of 11 factors extracted from a sample of 45 finally selected papers. Among these factors, six of the factors are ranked as critical factors. These critical factors are “Lack of coding standard in documentation,” “Use of popular programming tools,” “Crowd Lack of knowledge and awareness about sustainability,” “Energy‐efficient coding,” “Lack of awareness about sustainable software engineering practices,” and “Lack of coordination/communication between client and crowd.”

A Fuzzy-TOPSIS-Based Approach to Assessing Sustainability in Software Engineering: An Industry 5.0 Perspective

New possibilities and challenges have evolved in the setting of the software engineering sector’s rapid transition to Industry 5.0, wherein sustainability takes centre stage. Appropriate evaluation approaches are required for analysing the long-term viability of software engineering practices within this paradigm. This study proposes an innovative approach to evaluating sustainability in software engineering within Industry 5.0 by utilising the fuzzy technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (fuzzy TOPSIS) methodology. The fuzzy TOPSIS approach is effective at accounting for the inherent uncertainties as well as imprecisions related to sustainability assessments, allowing for informed decision-making. This approach helps in the recognition of the most sustainable software engineering practices in Industry 5.0 by taking into account a defined set of sustainability parameters. We rigorously analyse the current literature and expert views to provide an extensive set of relevant sustainability standards for the area of software engineering. Following that, we develop an evaluation methodology based on fuzzy TOPSIS that can handle the subjectivity as well as fuzziness inherent in sustainability evaluations. A case study with a software development company functioning in Industry 5.0 demonstrates the utility and efficacy of our suggested framework. The case study outcomes reveal the benefits and drawbacks of various software engineering methodologies in terms of sustainability. The study’s findings provide substantial information for decision-makers in the software engineering field, assisting them in making educated decisions about sustainable. Finally, this study helps to establish environmentally and socially appropriate techniques within the context of Industry 5.0.

Green Software Engineering: Cloud-based Face Detection and Static Code Analysis

This paper presents an approach to green software engineering that integrates cloud-based face detection and static code analysis to promote sustainable software development. The proposed method uses OpenCV, a computer vision library, and a pre-trained Haar cascade classifier to detect faces in images. Faces are marked with green bounding frames that serve as visual indicators of their locations. In addition, the paper evaluates the quality of a distinct script file using Pylint library static code analysis techniques. The analysis evaluates code compliance with standards, identifies potential flaws, and identifies code odors. By integrating these practices, the proposed method seeks to reduce resource consumption, maximize energy efficiency, and enhance code maintainability, promoting environmentally friendly and sustainable software engineering practices. One outcome of our effort was creating the YasminNadiaArabcSocialMediaImages data collection, which includes faces of Arabic social media celebrities and is filled out to be accessible for public usage on the websites Kaggle and GitHub.

Social Sustainability Approaches for a Sustainable Software Product

Sustainability is the use of existing resources without compromising them for future generations. Resources must be guaranteed in the environmental, economic, and social dimensions. Sustainable Software Engineering is an emerging research field aiming to minimize software development's negative impacts on society. Furthermore, software sustainability can be defined as a way of keeping something running at a certain level of quality in relation to these dimensions. From the social dimension perspective, it is necessary to confirm software's trade-offs, benefits, and impacts on society since it lacks empirical evidence of its achievements in software. In this research thesis, we will explore how the literature addresses the aspect of social sustainability during software development and understand how social sustainability approaches can be integrated into the context of agile software development. In the end, we expect to have a set of guidelines, activities, and practices that can be adopted by agile teams.

Transformation²: Making software engineering accountable for sustainability

Software engineering, as a central practice of digitalization, needs to become accountable for sustainability. In light of the ecological crises and the tremendous impact of digital systems on reshaping economic and social arrangements - often with negative side-effects - we need a sustainability transformation of the digital transformation. However, this is a complex and long-term task. In this article we combine an analysis of accountability arrangements in software engineering and a model of sustainability transformations to trace how certain dynamics are starting to make software engineering accountable for sustainability in the technological, cultural, economic and governance domains. The article discusses existing approaches for sustainable software engineering and software engineering for sustainability, traces emerging discourses that connect digitalization and sustainability, highlights new digital business models that may support sustainability and shows governance efforts to highlight “green and digital” policy problems. Yet, we argue that these are so far niche dynamics and that a sustainability transformation requires a collective and long-lasting effort to engender systemic changes. The goal should be to create varied accountability arrangements for sustainability in software engineering which is embedded in complex ways in society and economy.

Software industry awareness on sustainable software engineering: a Brazilian perspective

Sustainable computing is a rapidly growing research area spanning several areas of computer science. In the software engineering field, the topic has received increasing attention in recent years, with several studies addressing a range of concerns. However, few studies have demonstrated the awareness of software practitioners about the underlying concepts of sustainability in the software development practice. In this effect, this study aims to provide some evidence regarding the practitioners’ perception about the adoption of sustainability in software development, under four main perspectives: economic, social, environmental, and technical. In previous work, we carried out a preliminary survey study with twenty-five software engineers who work in a range of domains. The yielded results indicate an overall lack of knowledge about the topic, in particular, related to concepts about sustainable software. In this study, we extend the survey and reached a number of ninety-seven respondents. The novel results confirmed the evidence raised in the original survey that sustainability in the context of software is a new subject for software practitioners. However, professionals have shown interest in it. There is a general understanding that sustainability should be treated as a quality attribute. Among the observed perspectives, we generated an initial theory, which shows that software practitioners know the subject around ‘Green in Software’, even unconsciously. This study contributes to the green and sustainable software engineering field by bringing evidence on comprehending how the software industry understands the adoption of sustainability in the software development process.

Early Prediction of a Team Performance in the Initial Assessment Phases of a Software Project for Sustainable Software Engineering Education

Software engineering is a competitive field in education and practice. Software projects are key elements of software engineering courses. Software projects feature a fusion of process and product. The process reflects the methodology of performing the overall software engineering practice. The software product is the final product produced by applying the process. Like any other academic domain, an early evaluation of the software product being developed is vital to identify the at-risk teams for sustainable education in software engineering. Guidance and instructor attention can help overcome the confusion and difficulties of low performing teams. This study proposed a hybrid approach of information gain feature selection with a J48 decision tree to predict the earliest possible phase for final performance prediction. The proposed technique was compared with the state-of-the-art machine learning (ML) classifiers, naïve Bayes (NB), artificial neural network (ANN), logistic regression (LR), simple logistic regression (SLR), repeated incremental pruning to produce error reduction (RIPPER), and sequential minimal optimization (SMO). The goal of this process is to predict the teams expected to obtain a below-average grade in software product development. The proposed technique outperforms others in the prediction of low performing teams at an early assessment stage. The proposed J48-based technique outperforms others by making 89% correct predictions.

Sustainable Software Engineering:A Perspective of Individual Sustainability

Sustainable software engineering is a mean of developing sustainable software with sustainable software engineering process activities while balancing its various dimensions for instance economic, environmental, social, technical and individual. It is conveyed that the economic, technical, environmental and social dimensions are explored to satisfactory degree however the individual dimension of sustainable software engineering which is concerned with wellbeing of software engineers is not explored to satisfactory degree with respect to its understanding and challenges. Therefore, the aim of the study is to highlight and prioritize the challenges regarding individual sustainability dimension. The study also provides the mitigation strategies for the top five individual sustainability challenges. The systematic literature review has been performed to report the challenges and mitigation strategies. The study finding shows that lack of domain knowledge, lack of methodologies and tool support, lack of education, varying and unidentified situations and lack of sustainable software engineering practices are top most challenges regarding individual sustainability. These challenges need an urgent attention to achieve the goal of sustainable software engineering. The study also reports various mitigation strategies to overcome the risk of identified top most individual sustainability challenges such as to introduce sustainable software engineering education and knowledge in software engineering curricula, development of knowledge sharing frameworks and awareness regarding unclear and varying situations for each software engineering activity etc. The study will be beneficial for sustainable software engineering body of knowledge, sustainable software engineering practitioners and researchers by providing classified list of individual sustainability challenges and their mitigation strategies.

Framework for the Development of Sustainable Green Software

Over the last few years green and sustainable software engineering has become a tremendous area for researchers and developing companies. The environmentally sound, Information & Communication Technology (ICT) products and sustainable green software gained much attraction for research. Because, software is a type of product that doesn’t provide any warranty since its documentations are not free of errors. If a physical fault is found in the storage medium, it can be replaced; however almost no developers claim with conviction software as error free. This idea reflects that software and other industrial products are completely contradictory to each other. Therefore, this article is basically related to the factors affecting the development of sustainable and green software for customer satisfaction.

Exploring Potential Factors in Green and Sustainable Software Product

software engineering is a principle role of our activity in social and economic life. Software engineers are starting to comprehend the significance of designing sustainability regarding software processes. The field of sustainable and green software and green software engineering is still young. Thus, in modern society, researches effort is mainly focused on green and sustainable software engineering itself. In other words, the aim of this study at hand aims an in-depth understanding of the related potential factors for the purpose of improving the recently reluctant trend of sustainability dimension in green software based on life cycle of green software product process. To reach this purpose, this study is reviewed latest research and used conceptual model. A conceptual model is rendered demonstrating the consolidated life cycles of sustainable product and principle sustainable measurement dimensions, for example, energy or information efficiency, low cost, Resource efficiency, Waste reduction, Equality support and human health.

Report on the Third Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE3)

This report records and discusses the Third Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE3). The report includes a description of the keynote presentation of the workshop, which served as an overview of sustainable scientific software. It also summarizes a set of lightning talks in which speakers highlighted to-the-point lessons and challenges pertaining to sustaining scientific software. The final and main contribution of the report is a summary of the discussions, future steps, and future organization for a set of self-organized working groups on topics including developing pathways to funding scientific software; constructing useful common metrics for crediting software stakeholders; identifying principles for sustainable software engineering design; reaching out to research software organizations around the world; and building communities for software sustainability. For each group, we include a point of contact and a landing page that can be used by those who want to join that group's future activities. The main challenge left by the workshop is to see if the groups will execute these activities that they have scheduled, and how the WSSSPE community can encourage this to happen.

Developing sustainable software solutions for bioinformatics by the " Butterfly" paradigm.

Software design and sustainable software engineering are essential for the long-term development of bioinformatics software. Typical challenges in an academic environment are short-term contracts, island solutions, pragmatic approaches and loose documentation. Upcoming new challenges are big data, complex data sets, software compatibility and rapid changes in data representation. Our approach to cope with these challenges consists of iterative intertwined cycles of development (" Butterfly" paradigm) for key steps in scientific software engineering. User feedback is valued as well as software planning in a sustainable and interoperable way. Tool usage should be easy and intuitive. A middleware supports a user-friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI) as well as a database/tool development independently. We validated the approach of our own software development and compared the different design paradigms in various software solutions.

Developing sustainable software solutions for bioinformatics by the “Butterfly” paradigm

Software design and sustainable software engineering are essential for the long-term development of bioinformatics software. Typical challenges in an academic environment are short-term contracts, island solutions, pragmatic approaches and loose documentation. Upcoming new challenges are big data, complex data sets, software compatibility and rapid changes in data representation. Our approach to cope with these challenges consists of iterative intertwined cycles of development (“Butterfly” paradigm) for key steps in scientific software engineering. User feedback is valued as well as software planning in a sustainable and interoperable way. Tool usage should be easy and intuitive. A middleware supports a user-friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI) as well as a database/tool development independently. We validated the approach of our own software development and compared the different design paradigms in various software solutions.

Exploring initial challenges for green software engineering

The GREENS workshop provides a forum for practitioners and academics to share knowledge, ideas, practices and current results related to green and sustainable software engineering. This first workshop was held at ICSE 2012 in Zurich, Switzerland. It featured a keynote talk, twelve research position statements and two breakout sessions that discussed topics that ranged from bringing sustainability and energy efficiency into all software lifecycle stages, to green measures and estimations, practices, notations, and tools to both greening the software engineering process, and greening the resulting Information and Communication Technology systems. This report presents the themes of the workshop, summarizes the results of the discussions held in the breakout sessions, as well as the identified research challenges.

The GREENSOFT Model: A reference model for green and sustainable software and its engineering

The resource and power consumption of ICT is still increasing, but also the benefits of ICT, e.g. in finding more efficient solutions for environmental problems. To date, it is not clear, whether the resource and energy savings through ICT overbalance the resource and energy consumption by ICT, or not. Up to now, manifold efforts of Green IT address the environmental aspects of sustainability considering computer hardware. However, there is still a lack of models, descriptions or realizations in the area of computer software and software process models. In our contribution, we first propose definitions of the terms “Green and Sustainable Software” and “Green and Sustainable Software Engineering”, then we outline a conceptual reference model, the GREENSOFT Model. This model includes a cradle-to-grave product life cycle model for software products, sustainability metrics and criteria for software, software engineering extensions for sustainably sound software design and development, as well as appropriate guidance.