International audience

The world faces escalating crises: record-breaking temperatures, widespread fires, severe flooding, increased oceanic microplastics, and unequal resource distribution. Academia introduces courses around sustainability to meet the new demand, but software engineering education lags behind. While software systems contribute to environmental issues through high energy consumption, they also hold the potential for solutions, such as more efficient and equitable resource management. Yet, sustainability remains a low priority for many businesses, including those in the digital sector. Business as usual is no longer viable. A transformational change in software engineering education is urgently needed. We must move beyond traditional curriculum models and fully integrate sustainability into every aspect of software development. By embedding sustainability as a core competency, we can equip future engineers not only to minimise harm but also to innovate solutions that drive positive, sustainable change. Only with such a shift can software engineering education meet the demands of a world in crisis and prepare students to lead the next generation of sustainable technology. This article discusses a set of challenges and proposes a customisable education roadmap for integrating sustainability into the software engineering curricula. These challenges reflect our perspective on key considerations, stemming from regular, intensive discussions in regular workshops among the authors and the community, as well as our extensive research and teaching experience in the field.

Marine in-situ data is collected by sensors mounted on fixed or mobile systems deployed into the ocean. This type of data is crucial both for the ocean industries and public authorities, e.g., for monitoring and forecasting the state of marine ecosystems and/or climate changes. Various public organizations have collected, managed, and openly shared in-situ marine data in the past decade. Recently, initiatives like the Ocean Decade Corporate Data Group have incentivized the sharing of marine data of public interest from private companies aiding in ocean management. However, there is no clear understanding of the impact of data quality in the engineering of systems, as well as on how to manage and exploit the collected data. In this paper, we propose main architectural decisions and a data flow-oriented component and connector view for marine in-situ data streams. Our results are based on a longitudinal empirical software engineering process, and driven by knowledge extracted from the experts in the marine domain from public and private organizations, and challenges identified in the literature. The proposed software architecture is instantiated and exemplified in a prototype implementation.

Achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) demands a shift by industry, governments, society, and individuals to reach adequate levels of awareness and actions to address sustainability challenges. Software systems will play an important role in moving towards these targets. Sustainability skills are necessary to support the development of software systems and to provide sustainable IT-supported services for citizens. While there is a growing number of academic bodies including sustainability education in engineering and computer science curricula, there is not yet comprehensive research on the competencies and skills required by IT professionals to develop such systems. This study aims to identify the industrial sustainability needs for education and training from software engineers’ perspective. For this, we answer the following questions: (1) what are the interests of organisations with an IT division with respect to sustainability? (2) what do organisations want to achieve with respect to sustainability, and how? and (3) what are the sustainability-related competencies and skills that organisations need to achieve their sustainability goals? We conducted a qualitative study with interviews and focus groups with experts from twenty-eight organisations with an IT division from nine countries to understand their interests, goals, and achievements related to sustainability, and the skills and competencies needed to achieve their goals. Our findings show that organisations are interested in sustainability, both idealistically and increasingly for core business reasons. They seek to improve the sustainability of software processes and products but encounter difficulties, like the trade-off between short-term financial profitability and long-term sustainability goals or an unclear understanding of sustainability concepts from a software engineering perspective. To fill these gaps, they have promoted in-house training courses, collaborated with universities, and sent employees to external training. The acquired competencies should support translating environmental and social benefits into economic ones and make sustainability an integral part of software development.

Background: In-situ marine data has a low reusability rate, primarily due to differences in data usage objectives among stakeholders in data ecosystems. The extreme cost of collecting and maintaining in-situ marine data threatens the sustainable usage of the ocean. Aims: This paper provides an overview of current data and data quality (DQ) requirements. We also investigate limitations in the current practices that obstruct data reusability. The ultimate objective is to improve data requirements elicitation, leading to enhanced data reusability. Method: We interviewed 14 marine practitioners and researchers from 7 organizations with extensive experience in collecting, managing, and utilizing in-situ marine data. Results: We identify 9 representative use cases in the fishery, energy, and marine sciences industries, as well as their data and DQ requirements. The results give guidance to data producers to produce data meeting demands of a wider range of data consumers. At the same time, data consumers can refer to the compilation to identify existing data suiting their needs. Furthermore, we recommend a roadmap taken into account during requirements elicitation to improve 6 limitations in the current practices that obstruct data reusability.

The ocean is vital for humankind but may cause catastrophes when unhealthy. Although there have been efforts to build ocean monitoring systems, the understanding of the underwater environment is limited due to the cost and challenges of obtaining real-time marine data. One potential solution is to build stationary ocean observation systems based on wireless communication due to its affordable cost. In this study, we divide these systems into three components: 1) underwater data acquisition; 2) network communication; and 3) data management. We investigate the engineering challenges associated with each component, the causes, and how they relate. The literature has not discussed the technical issues of building stationary smart ocean monitoring systems entirely based on wireless communication yet. This article fills that research gap by conducting semi-structured interviews with 17 experts knowledgeable about underwater sensors, underwater acoustic communication, offshore network communication, and underwater data usage. The identified challenges are compared with the literature to assess whether our findings are novel or are a confirmation of what have been already found in prior publications. The Internet of Things (IoT) used in smart city platforms is quite advanced, but the Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT) employed in smart ocean monitoring systems has several unresolved issues; although IoT is viewed as a foundation for IoUT. Therefore, we compare fundamental differences between the technologies used in the smart city and the smart ocean domains, explaining why some of our identified challenges are unique in the marine context.