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.

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.

To foster a sustainable society within a sustainable environment, we must dramatically reshape our work and consumption activities, most of which are facilitated through software. Yet, most software engineers hardly consider the effects on the sustainability of the IT products and services they deliver. This issue is exacerbated by a lack of methods and tools for this purpose. Despite the practical need for methods and tools that explicitly support consideration of the effects that IT products and services have on the sustainability of their intended environments, such methods and tools remain largely unavailable. Thus, urgent research is needed to understand how to design such tools for the IT community properly. In this article, we describe our experience using design science to create the Sustainability Awareness Framework (SusAF), which supports software engineers in anticipating and mitigating the potential sustainability effects during system development. More specifically, we identify and present the challenges faced during this process. The challenges that we have faced and addressed in the development of the SusAF are likely to be relevant to others who aim to create methods and tools to integrate sustainability analysis into their IT products and services development. Thus, the lessons learned in SusAF development are shared for the benefit of researchers and other professionals who design tools for that end.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations focus on key issues for the transformation of our world towards sustainability. We argue for stronger integration of the SDGs into requirements and software engineering and for the creation of methods and tools that support the analysis of potential effects of software systems on sustainability in general and on SDGs in particular. To demonstrate one way of undertaking this integration, we report on how the Sustainability Awareness Framework (SusAF -- a tool developed by the authors of this paper) can be mapped to the SDGs, allowing the identification of potential effects of software systems on sustainability and on the SDGs. This mapping exercise demonstrates that it is possible for requirements engineers working on a specific system to consider that system's impact with respect to SDGs.

Background: Many decisions made in Software Engineering practices are intertemporal choices: trade-offs in time between closer options with potential short-term benefit and future options with potential long-term benefit. However, how software professionals make intertemporal decisions is not well understood. Aim: This paper investigates how shifting time frames influence preferences in software projects in relation to purposefully selected background factors. Method: We investigate temporal discounting by replicating a questionnaire-based observational study. The replication uses a changed-population and -experimenter design to increase the internal and external validity of the original results. Results: The results of this study confirm the occurrence of temporal discounting in samples of both professional and student participants from different countries and demonstrate strong variance in discounting between study participants. We found that professional experience influenced discounting. Participants with broader professional experience exhibited less discounting than those with narrower experience. Conclusions: The results provide strong empirical support for the relevance and importance of temporal discounting in SE and the urgency of targeted interdisciplinary research to explore the underlying mechanisms and their theoretical and practical implications. The results suggest that technical debt management could be improved by increasing the breadth of experience available for critical decisions with long-term impact. In addition, the present study provides a methodological basis for replicating temporal discounting studies in software engineering.

Integrating novel software systems in our society, economy, and environment can have far-reaching effects. As a result, software systems should be designed in such a way as to maintain or improve the sustainability of the socio-technical system of their destination. However, a paradigm shift is required to raise awareness of software professionals on the potential sustainability effects of software systems. While Requirements Engineering is considered the key to driving this change, requirements engineers lack the knowledge, experience and methodological support for doing so. This paper presents a question-based framework for raising awareness of the potential effects of software systems on sustainability, as the first step towards enabling the required paradigm shift. A feasibility study of the framework was carried out with two groups of computer science students. The results of the study indicate that the framework helps enable discussions about potential effects that software systems could have on sustainability.

Requirements are a key factor in determining the success or failure of the system development process. Requirements engineering is a creative problem-solving process whose primary purpose is to enable researchers and practitioners to apply appropriate theories, models, techniques and tools to understand and support the requirements processes more effectively. However, there is a multitude of ways to conduct the requirements engineering process and the quality of the requirements can be greatly influenced by the approaches employed. While consensus exists that no one approach works in all situations, how do practitioners and researchers select the most relevant and appropriate approach(es)? In order to understand this, we argue that a community-based effort is required to organise the plethora of requirements engineering approaches into an ontology. Such a structure would provide an opportunity to identify gaps and to improve the interfaces between approaches. Crowdsourcing the development and validation of such an ontology would facilitate its application across different system types and application domains.

Requirements Engineering (RE) plays a critical role in software system development and is argued to be the key leverage point for practitioners who want to design sustainable software-intensive systems. However, existing RE methods and tools do not explicitly facilitate the discussion and negotiation of sustainability-related concerns. This leads to insufficient or onedimensional perceptions of sustainability. In this paper, we discuss our understanding of sustainability and its relationship with requirements. Based on the outcomes of this discussion, we have extended the WinWin Negotiation Model by incorporating sustainability concepts so that the negotiation also includes the ability to consider the impact of requirements on sustainability. Applying this negotiation method in an exploratory industrial case study, we have learned that this approach stimulates the discussion on sustainability and its multiple dimensions. It also allows practitioners to reflect on requirements and their effects on sustainability. However, we have also observed that further in-depth requirements analysis is needed to analyse the long-term effects of requirements regarding sustainability.

Continuous requirements elicitation is an essential aspect of software product evolution to keep systems aligned with changing user needs. However, current requirements engineering approaches do not explicitly address sustainability in the evolution of systems. Reasons include a lack of awareness and a lack of shared understanding of the concept of sustainability in the RE community. Identifying and analysing the effects of requirements regarding sustainability is challenging, as these effects can have an impact on multiple stakeholders and manifest themselves in one or more sustainability dimensions at different points in time. We argue that crowd-focused semi-automated requirements engineering allows the engagement of a large number of stakeholders (including users and domain experts) in a continuous cycle of negotiation regarding the potential effects of requirements on sustainability. Based on a motivating scenario, we introduce the idea of a platform for crowd-focused requirements engineering that supports the evolution towards sustainability. For the three key aspects of this platform, we present our ongoing work and discuss early results. We outline how the platform can be utilised to improve the broader awareness and understanding of sustainability, not only for the involved crowd but also for researchers and society in general.

Global software stacks on scientific cluster computing resources are required to provide a homogeneous software environment which is typically inflexible. Efforts to integrate Virtual Machines (VMs), in order to abstract the software environment of various scientific applications, suffer from performance limitations and require systems administration expertise to maintain. However, the motivation is clear; in addition to increasing resource utilization, the burden of supporting new software installations on existing systems can be reduced. In this paper, we introduce the Virtual Container Cluster (VCC) that encapsulates a typical HPC software environment within Docker containers. The novel component cluster–watcher enables context aware discovery and configuration of the virtual cluster. Containers offer a lightweight alternative to VMs that more closely match the native performance, and presents a solution that is more accessible to customization by the average user. Combined with a Software Defined Networking (SDN) technology, the VCC enables dynamic features such as transparent scaling and spanning across multiple physical resources. Although SDN introduces an additional performance limitation, within the context of a parallel communication network, the benchmarking demonstrates that this cost is application dependent. The Linpack benchmarking shows that the overhead of container virtualization and SDN interconnect is comparable to the native performance.

Sustainability has emerged as a broad concern for society. Many engineering disciplines have been grappling with challenges in how we sustain technical, social and ecological systems. In the software engineering community, for example, maintainability has been a concern for a long time. But too often, these issues are treated in isolation from one another. Misperceptions among practitioners and research communities persist, rooted in a lack of coherent understanding of sustainability, and how it relates to software systems research and practice. This article presents a cross-disciplinary initiative to create a common ground and a point of reference for the global community of research and practice in software and sustainability, to be used for effectively communicating key issues, goals, values and principles of sustainability design for software-intensive systems.The centrepiece of this effort is the Karlskrona Manifesto for Sustainability Design, a vehicle for a much needed conversation about sustainability within and beyond the software community, and an articulation of the fundamental principles underpinning design choices that affect sustainability. We describe the motivation for developing this manifesto, including some considerations of the genre of the manifesto as well as the dynamics of its creation. We illustrate the collaborative reflective writing process and present the current edition of the manifesto itself. We assess immediate implications and applications of the articulated principles, compare these to current practice, and suggest future steps.

The vision of service-oriented computing is one of loosely coupled services that create agile applications to encapsulate business objectives and processes. The potential of services to form complex systems of systems, with emergent behaviour, necessitates the need to understand how we can we develop sufficient confidence in their qualities. In this paper we argue that successful development and evolution of service oriented computing is dependent on making informed decisions at the architectural level. This poses a number of challenges concerning how to evaluate such system architectures and the measurements and metrics that are important in their assessment. This paper describes research-in-progress into the development of a scenario-based architectural evaluation framework that allows architectural-level reasoning across systems of systems in the context of Network Enabled Capability: a UK Ministry endeavour designed to achieve enhanced [military] effect through the physical networking and coherent integration of existing and future resources.

Network enabled capability (NEC) is the U.K. Ministry of Defencepsilas response to the quickly changing conflict environment in which its forces must operate. In NEC, systems need to be integrated in context, to assist in human activity and provide dependable inter-operation. In order to provide reliable and sustainable military capability, fast paced changes must be conducted without halting the operation of a capability. In this paper we present the concept of evolutionary service-oriented architecture for delivering sustainable capability. The reliability of the architecture is evaluated by simulations using a computer-based model. The simulation results indicate that the evolutionary service-oriented architecture can provide higher reliability and sustainability in the provision of capability in a dynamic environment.

We describe the experience of using a combination of requirements engineering techniques (scenarios, storyboards, observation and workshops) in an e-science application to develop a geographical analysis tool for epidemiologists. Problems encountered were: eliciting tacit knowledge; and creating new visions and working practices for our users. The combination of techniques worked well, although observation of working practice was not so effective in this scientific domain, where activity is mainly cognitive.