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.

Home energy management systems (HEMS) offer control and the ability to manage energy, generating and collecting energy consumption data at the most detailed level. However, data at this level poses various privacy concerns, including, for instance, profiling consumer behaviors and large-scale surveillance. The question of how utility providers can get value from such data without infringing consumers’ privacy has remained under-investigated. We address this gap by exploring the pro-sharing attitudes and privacy perceptions of 30 HEMS users and non-users through an interview study. While participants are concerned about data misuse and stigmatization, our analysis also reveals that incentives, altruism, trust, security and privacy, transparency and accountability encourage data sharing. From this analysis, we derive privacy design strategies for HEMS that can both improve privacy and engender adoption.

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.

Abstract Today, when undertaking requirements elicitation, engineers attend to the needs and wants of the user groups considered relevant for the software system. However, answers to some relevant questions (e.g., how to improve adoption of the intended system) cannot always be addressed through direct need and want elicitation. Using an example of energy demand-response systems, this paper demonstrates that use of grounded theory analysis can help address such questions. The theories emerging from such analysis produce a set of additional requirements which cannot be directly elicited from individuals/groups, and would otherwise be missed. Thus, we demonstrate that the theories generated through grounded theory analysis can serve as additional valuable sources of requirements for software and its wider system. This paper extends our previous work by demonstrating how several theories can be constructed and utilised for a single system analysis.

Peer-to-peer energy-trading platforms (P2P) have the potential to transform the current energy system. However, research is presently scarce on how people would like to participate in, and what would they expect to gain from, such platforms. We address this gap by exploring these questions in the context of the UK energy market. Using a qualitative interview study, we examine how 45 people with an interest in renewable energy understand P2P. We find that the prospective users value the collective benefits of P2P, and understand participation as a mechanism to support social, ecological and economic benefits for communities and larger groups. Drawing on the findings from the interview analysis, we explore broad design characteristics that a prospective P2P energy trading platform should provide to meet the expectations and concerns voiced by our study participants.

Today, when undertaking requirements elicitation, engineers attend to the needs and wants of the user groups considered relevant for the software system. However, answers to some relevant question (e.g., how to improve adoption of the intended system) cannot always be addressed through direct need and want elicitation. Using an example of energy demand-response systems, this paper demonstrates that use of grounded theory analysis can help address such questions. The theory emerging from such analysis produces a set of additional requirements which cannot be directly elicited from individuals/groups, and would otherwise be missed out. Thus, we demonstrate that the theory generated through grounded theory analysis can serve as an additional valuable source of software system requirements.

Demand response has been discussed as one of the key means through which peak energy demand could be ameliorated. A wide variety of research and trial studies have been conducted on this topic. Yet, there has been no requirements elicitation exercise undertaken to explicitly state the requirements that a smart appliance automation service must address to be accepted by households at large. This paper presents a pilot study on just such an exercise, identifying key themes from pilot interviews. From these themes we identify several groups of requirements, such as a need to retain ultimate appliance control (e.g., through manual overrides); need for discriminating between specific appliances and their contexts for automation; and the need to be able to associate personal meaning to the service participation process by setting own goals.

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.

Technical Debt arises from decisions that favour short-term outcomes at the cost of longer-term disadvantages. They may be taken knowingly or based on missing or incomplete awareness of the costs; they are taken in different roles, situations, stages and ways. Whatever technical or business factor motivate such decisions, they always imply a trade-off in time, a 'now vs. later'. How exactly are such decisions made, and how have they been studied?

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.

Abstract Sustainable living, ie, living within the bounds of the available environmental, social, and economic resources, is the focus of many present‐day social and scientific discussions. But what does sustainability mean within the context of software engineering? In this paper, we undertake a comprehensive analysis of 8 case studies to address this question within the context of a specific software engineering approach, software product line engineering (SPLE). We identify the sustainability‐related characteristics that arise in present‐day studies that apply SPLE. We conclude that technical and economic sustainability are in prime focus on the present SPLE practice, with social sustainability issues, where they relate to organisations, also addressed to a good degree. On the other hand, the issues related to the personal sustainability are less prominent, and environmental considerations are nearly completely amiss. We present feature models and cross‐relations that result from our analysis as a starting point for sustainability engineering through SPLE, suggesting that any new development should consider how these models would be instantiated and expanded for the intended sociotechnical system. The good representation of sustainability features in these models is also validated with 2 additional case studies.

Security is one of the biggest challenges facing organisations in the modern hyper-connected world. A number of theoretical security models are available that provide best practice security guidelines and are widely utilised as a basis to identify and operationalise security requirements. Such models often capture high-level security concepts (e.g., whitelisting, secure configurations, wireless access control, data recovery, etc.), strategies for operationalising such concepts through specific security controls, and relationships between the various concepts and controls. The threat landscape, however, evolves leading to new tacit knowledge that is embedded in or across a variety of security incidents. These unknown knowns alter, or at least demand reconsideration of the theoretical security models underpinning security requirements. In this paper, we present an approach to discover such unknown knowns through multi-incident analysis. The approach is based on a novel combination of grounded theory and incident fault trees. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach through its application to identify revisions to a theoretical security model widely used in industry.

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.

As our understanding and care for sustainability concerns increases, so does the demand for incorporating these concerns into software. Yet, existing programming language constructs are not well-aligned with concepts of the sustainability domain. This undermines what we term technical sustainability of the software due to (i) increased complexity in programming of such concerns and (ii) continuous code changes to keep up with changes in (environmental, social, legal and other) sustainability-related requirements. In this paper we present a proof-of-concept approach on how technical sustainability support for new and existing concerns can be provided through flexible language-level programming. We propose to incorporate sustainability-related behaviour into programs through micro-languages enabling such behaviour to be updated and/or redefined as and when required.

This paper presents an initial framework for managing emergent ethical concerns during software engineering in society projects. We argue that such emergent considerations can neither be framed as absolute rules about how to act in relation to fixed and measurable conditions. Nor can they be addressed by simply framing them as non-functional requirements to be satisficed. Instead, a continuous process is needed that accepts the 'messiness' of social life and social research, seeks to understand complexity (rather than seek clarity), demands collective (not just individual) responsibility and focuses on dialogue over solutions. The framework has been derived based on retrospective analysis of ethical considerations in four software engineering in society projects in three different domains.

Sustainability encompasses a wide set of aims: ranging from energy efficient software products (environmental sustainability), reduction of software development and maintenance costs (economic sustainability), to employee wellbeing (social sustainability). This panel brings together researchers and practitioners to explore the role that sustainability will play in software product line engineering. The panel aims to explore how sustainability manifests itself in domain engineering, via study of, for instance, sustainability patterns in domain analysis, architectural decisions motivated by specific sustainability concerns, types of variability that results from sustainability considerations, as well as engineering of sustainability as a domain itself. This panel explores challenges in research and practice for Sustainability in Software Product Line Engineering.

The requirements and design level identification and representation of dynamic variability for adaptive systems is a challenging task. This requires time and effort to identify and model the relevant elements as well as the need to consider the large number of potentially possible system configurations. Typically, each individual variability dimension needs to identified and modelled by enumerating each possible alternative. The full set of requirements needs to be reviewed to extract all potential variability dimensions. Moreover, each possible configuration of an adaptive system needs to be validated before use. In this demonstration, we present a tool suite that is able to manage dynamic variability in adaptive systems and tame such system complexity. This tool suite is able to automatically identify dynamic variability attributes such as variability dimensions, context, adaptation rules, and soft/hard goals from requirements documents. It also supports modelling of these artefacts as well as their run-time verification and validation.

Due to the very large number of configurations that can typically be derived from a Dynamic Software Product Line (DSPL), efficient and effective testing of such systems have become a major challenge for software developers. In particular, when a configuration needs to be deployed quickly due to rapid contextual changes (e.g., in an unfolding crisis), time constraints hinder the proper testing of such a configuration. In this paper, we propose to reduce the testing required of such DSPLs to a relevant subset of configurations. Whenever a need to adapt to an untested configuration is encountered, our approach determines the most similar tested configuration and reuses its test results to either obtain a coverage measure or infer a confidence degree for the new, untested configuration. We focus on providing these techniques for inference of structural testing results for DSPLs, which is supported by an early prototype implementation.

One of the aims of aspect-oriented requirements engineering is to address the composability and subsequent analysis of crosscutting and non-crosscutting concerns during requirements engineering. Composing concerns may help to reveal conflicting dependencies that need to be identified and resolved. However, detecting conflicts in a large set of textual aspect-oriented requirements is an error-prone and time-consuming task. This paper presents EA-analyzer, the first automated tool for identifying conflicts in aspect-oriented requirements specified in natural-language text. The tool is based on a novel application of a Bayesian learning method that has been effective at classifying text. We present an empirical evaluation of the tool with three industrial-strength requirements documents from different real-life domains. We show that the tool achieves up to 92.97% accuracy when one of the case study documents is used as a training set and the other two as a validation set.

The goal of aspect-oriented requirements engineering (AORE) is to identify possible crosscutting concerns, and to develop composition specifications around those concerns. These compositions can be used to reason about potential conflicts in the requirements and to relate requirements to architecture in semantically meaningful ways. Recent work in AORE has moved from a syntactic approach to composition, which leads to fragile compositions and increased coupling between aspect and base concerns, to a semantic composition approach, based on semantics of the natural language itself. However, such compositions are at present only informally specified, and as such formal reasoning about the requirements and the subsequent derivations are difficult. We present a formal approach to these semantic-based compositions which facilitates this reasoning. We show that the approach especially lends itself to identifying conflicts between requirements and mapping compositions to a derived architecture.

Aspect-Oriented requirements engineering helps to achieve early separation of concerns by supporting systematic analysis of broadly-scoped properties such as security, real-time constraints, etc. The early identification and separation of aspects and base abstractions crosscut by them helps to avoid costly refactorings at later stages such as design and code. However, if not handled effectively, the aspect identification task can become a bottleneck requiring a significant effort due to the large amount of, often poorly structured or imprecise, information available to a requirements engineer. In this paper, we describe a tool, EA-Miner, that provides effective automated support for identifying and separating aspectual and non-aspectual concerns as well as their crosscutting relationships at the requirements level. The tool utilises natural language processing techniques to reason about the properties of the concerns and model their structure and relationships.

In this paper, we discuss how mutual influences (e.g. conflicts) of different stakeholder concerns can be detected and reasoned about through composition and stepwise refinement. Some concepts from the aspect-oriented software development paradigm are used to support the composition-centric approach.