Human–Robot Interaction (HRI) research is starting to engage with sustainability, yet the field remains tied to economic models that assume continual growth, rapid technological development, and market expansion. This economic growth orientation raises questions about whether HRI can genuinely support ecological responsibility, given the resource intensity of robotics research, production, and deployment. In this contribution, we introduce a post-growth perspective to reframe the relationship between robotics, sustainability, and society. We argue that rather than striving for `green growth' within existing economic structures, HRI should engage critically with concepts such as degrowth and post-capitalism. By shifting attention from growth to development, we invite the community to consider what robotic futures are worth pursuing and for whom.

Context: AI technologies are rapidly being integrated into society, offering numerous benefits but also raising significant ethical and social concerns. While some AI systems aim to improve efficiency and decision-making, they can also cause harmful impacts on individuals and society. Objective: This study examines both the immediate and systemic negative effects of AI systems, as well as the underlying factors that might contribute to these issues. Method: Using a multi-vocal literature review, we analyze 28 AI systems and their associated impacts, including discrimination, psychological and physical harm, and unfair treatment. Results: We identify key factors that might have led AI systems to operate in that manner and explain why these impacts may occur. Additionally, we propose initial concrete actions to mitigate these negative effects and promote the development of AI systems that align with ethical and social sustainability principles. Impact: By shedding light on these issues, we aim to raise awareness among researchers and developers, encouraging the adoption of more responsible and inclusive as well as concrete AI guidelines.

Software engineering tasks are high-stress and cognitively demanding. Additionally, there is a latent risk of software engineers presenting burnout, depression and anxiety. Established interventions in other fields centred around attention awareness have shown positive results in mental well-being.

In the face of declining food quality due to unsustainable farming practices, we have an opportunity to shift paradigms towards regenerative agriculture from an individual to a global scale. Regenerative agriculture is not yet present as an application domain in requirements engineering research. We open the discussion with an agroecology case (food forest design) that offers a perspective of how our natural environment has significant influence on potential yield and, consequently, on a supporting system’s design. This requires specific attention to domain modeling and requirements engineering. We contribute a clarification of terminology, a research roadmap, and the sketch of a pilot. They serve as foundation for a larger body of work.

Increased environmental challenges require explicitly including Nature as a stakeholder in software-intensive systems development. Currently, we are lacking a structured representation of the aspects of Nature as a stakeholder. Consequently, we continue to ignore specifically non-human stakeholders and their needs. We use design science research to contribute an artifact (the "Nature as a Stakeholder" taxonomy) developed in two iterations. The artifact can serve as reference taxonomy for Nature-aware development so we are accounting for environmental externalities.

The landscape of Software Engineering evolves rapidly amidst digital transformation and the ascendancy of AI, leading to profound shifts in the role and responsibilities of Software Engineers. This evolution encompasses both immediate changes, such as the adoption of Large Language Model-based approaches to coding, and deeper shifts driven by the profound societal and environmental impacts of technology. Despite the urgency, there persists a lag in adapting to these evolving roles. This roadmap article proposes 10 research challenges to develop a new generation of Software Engineers equipped to navigate the technical and social complexities as well as ethical considerations inherent in their evolving profession. Furthermore, the challenges target role definition, integration of AI, education transformation, standards evolution, and impact assessment to equip future Software Engineers to skillfully and responsibly handle the obstacles within their transforming discipline.

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.

The landscape of software engineering has dramatically changed in recent years. The impressive advances of artificial intelligence are just the latest and most disruptive innovation that has remarkably changed the software engineering research and practice. This special issue shares a roadmap to guide the software engineering community in this confused era. This roadmap is the outcome of a 2-day intensive discussion at the 2030 Software Engineering workshop. The roadmap spotlights and discusses seven main landmarks in the new software engineering landscape: artificial intelligence for software engineering, human aspects of software engineering, software security, verification and validation, sustainable software engineering, automatic programming, and quantum software engineering. This editorial summarizes the core aspects discussed in the 37 papers that comprise the seven sections of the special issue and guides the interested readers throughout the issue. This roadmap is a living body that we will refine with follow-up workshops that will update the roadmap for a series of forthcoming ACM TOSEM special issues.

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.

The International Working Conference on Requirement Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ) is an established international forum. Its goal is to foster the establishment and maintenance of a strong Requirements Engineering (RE) community across industry and academia through contributions that report on novel ideas and techniques to enhance the quality of RE’s products and processes.

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.

Abstract Context Computer workers in general, and software developers specifically, are under a high amount of stress due to continuous deadlines and, often, over-commitment. Objective This study investigates the effects of a neuroplasticity practice, a specific breathing practice, on the attention awareness, well-being, perceived productivity, and self-efficacy of computer workers. Method The intervention was a 12-week program with a weekly live session that included a talk on a well-being topic and a facilitated group breathing session. During the intervention period, we solicited one daily journal note and one weekly well-being rating. We created a questionnaire mainly from existing, validated scales as entry and exit survey for data points for comparison before and after the intervention. We replicated the intervention in a similarly structured 8-week program. The data was analyzed using Bayesian multi-level models for the quantitative part and thematic analysis for the qualitative part. Results The intervention showed improvements in participants’ experienced inner states despite an ongoing pandemic and intense outer circumstances for most. Over the course of the study, we found an improvement in the participants’ ratings of how often they found themselves in good spirits as well as in a calm and relaxed state. We also aggregate a large number of deep inner reflections and growth processes that may not have surfaced for the participants without deliberate engagement in such a program. Conclusion The data indicates usefulness and effectiveness of an intervention for computer workers in terms of increasing well-being and resilience. Everyone needs a way to deliberately relax, unplug, and recover. A breathing practice is a simple way to do so, and the results call for establishing a larger body of work to make this common practice.

As sustainability increasingly gains attention, it has also found its way into the area of software engineering, with a specific emphasis on requirements engineering. The Sustainability Awareness Framework (SusAF) proposed by Duboc et al. supports stakeholders in taking the long view at their software systems in terms of sustainability. In this paper, we propose SusApp, a web-based tool to simplify the application of the SusAF. In particular, it facilitates the documentation and visualization of effects on sustainability. To learn about the users’ perception of SusApp, we conducted two small-scale user studies that investigated the tool’s usability and usefulness. Overall, the studies showed that the tool was generally perceived positively by the participants. However, shortcomings in the usability became apparent, which have also impacted the perceived usefulness.

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.

Information system designers embed values into the systems they design, even if unwittingly. However, the values embedded in many information systems clash with values held by many sustainability communities. This research focuses on two grassroots sustainable agriculture communities, which are seeking to develop a food infrastructure that is under their own control, and thereby more resilient to disruptions across the globe. This paper presents a five-year ethnographic study of these two communities, maps out the values of members of these communities, and explores the implications of their values on the information systems that members use and that could be developed to support them in the future. By doing so, we hope to influence the design of future information systems to align more closely with the values of these stakeholders, and through these stakeholders to move toward a food system that supports food security and global sustainability.

Requirements Engineering (RE) has established itself as a software engineering discipline over the past decades. While researchers have been investigating the RE discipline with a plethora of empirical studies, attempts to systematically derive an empirical theory in context of the RE discipline have just recently been started. However, such a theory is needed if we are to define and motivate guidance in performing high quality RE research and practice. We aim at providing an empirical and externally valid foundation for a theory of RE practice, which helps software engineers establish effective and efficient RE processes in a problem-driven manner. We designed a survey instrument and an engineer-focused theory that was first piloted in Germany and, after making substantial modifications, has now been replicated in 10 countries worldwide. We have a theory in the form of a set of propositions inferred from our experiences and available studies, as well as the results from our pilot study in Germany. We evaluate the propositions with bootstrapped confidence intervals and derive potential explanations for the propositions. In this article, we report on the design of the family of surveys, its underlying theory, and the full results obtained from the replication studies conducted in 10 countries with participants from 228 organisations. Our results represent a substantial step forward towards developing an empirical theory of RE practice. The results reveal, for example, that there are no strong differences between organisations in different countries and regions, that interviews, facilitated meetings and prototyping are the most used elicitation techniques, that requirements are often documented textually, that traces between requirements and code or design documents are common, that requirements specifications themselves are rarely changed and that requirements engineering (process) improvement endeavours are mostly internally driven. Our study establishes a theory that can be used as starting point for many further studies for more detailed investigations. Practitioners can use the results as theory-supported guidance on selecting suitable RE methods and techniques.

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.

Context: Sustainability and sustainable development are emerging trends all around the world. The need for changes is evident and immediate. Problem: In order to address all the technical and social sustainability challenges people need to be educated. So far computer science and software engineering education has not fully answered to this need. Contribution: This paper presents one sustainability-focused ICT programme and analyses its evolution in order to find out the lessons learned after three cohorts of graduated students. This analysis is based on an evaluation model built based on literature. Results: The outcome of the analysis shows that understanding of the sustainability and thus the ways to increase the impact increases year by year. Although the evolution is quite evident and follows the general research trends the better impact and better readiness can be achieved through increased understanding.

Requirements Engineering (RE) has grown from its humble beginnings to embrace a wide variety of techniques, drawn from many disciplines, and the diversity of tasks currently performed under the label of RE has grown beyond that encom-passed by software development. We briefly review how RE has evolved and observe that RE is now a collection of best practices for pragmatic, outcome-focused critical thinking - applicable to any domain. We discuss an alternative perspective on, and de-scription of, the discipline of RE and advocate for the evolution of RE toward a discipline that supports the application of RE prac-tice to any domain. We call upon RE practitioners to proactively engage in alternative domains and call upon researchers that adopt practices from other domains to actively engage with their inspiring domains. For both, we ask that they report upon their experience so that we can continue to expand RE frontiers.

Welcome to this special issue on software engineering for sustainability. Note that software engineering for sustainability has a different emphasis than sustainability in software engineering. Naturally, the latter has a mainly technical focus. The first goes beyond it by looking at the purpose and wider context of a software system, for example, in how it can support social and environmental concerns that help humanity move towards a more sustainable lifestyle and help sustaining our planet and societies. This special issue takes this broad perspective. Before introducing the articles in this special issue, the following takes a look at why sustainability matters and why software engineering for sustainability has a large potential for impact. The general importance of sustainability as an objective for developing our future has become apparent via the Millennium Development Goals that were targeting 2015. 1 “At the Millennium Summit in September 2000” the largest gathering of world leaders in history adopted the UN Millennium Declaration, committing their nations to a new global partnership to reduce extreme poverty and setting out a series of time-bound and quantified targets, with a deadline of 2015, that have become known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).” 1 They address extreme poverty in its many dimensions—income poverty, hunger, disease, lack of adequate shelter, and exclusion—while promoting gender equality, education, and environmental sustainability. They also include basic human rights—health, education, shelter, and security. The world has made significant progress in achieving many of the goals, for example, between 1990 and 2002, average overall incomes rose by approximately 21%. The number of people in extreme poverty decreased by an estimated 130 million. Child mortality rates went down from 103 deaths per 1000 live births a year to 88. Life expectancy increased from 63 years to nearly 65 years. An additional 8% of the developing world's people now have access to water. And an additional 15% have access to improved sanitation services. 1 However, there still remains a lot to be done. The follow-up on the MDGs were the Sustainable Development Goals. 2 The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), also known as the Global Goals, are a “call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity.” 2 These 17 goals build on the successes of the MDGs, while including new priority areas such as climate change, economic inequality, innovation, sustainable consumption, peace and justice. The goals are interconnected: often the key to success on one will involve tackling issues more commonly associated with another. The SDGs provide guidelines and targets for all countries to adopt in accordance with their own priorities and the environmental challenges of the world at large. The SDGs are an inclusive agenda. They tackle the root causes of poverty and aim to unite all people to make a positive change for both people and planet. 2 Not limited to humanitarian and environmental causes, also business and economics recognize sustainability as a major objective. The newest edition of the UN Global Compact–Accenture Strategy CEO Study represents more than a decade of research on sustainable business. 5 Published every 3 years, it is the largest study of CEO attitudes to sustainability globally. The study traces the development of corporate motivations in engaging with environmental, social, and governance issues in core business. In this edition, over 1000 CEOs from 100+ countries and 25+ industries were interviewed. While in 2013, frustrated ambition was prevalent; now, there is optimism as CEOs see a mandate to solve societal challenges as a core element to gain competitive advantage. The backdrop to this edition of the study was the adoption of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the SDGs. Results suggest that business leaders are committed to sustainability, forging a stronger global environment for business. “The majority of CEOs surveyed (87%) believe the SDGs provide an opportunity to rethink approaches to sustainable value creation—and 78% already see opportunities to contribute through core business.” 6 According to nearly half of all CEOs surveyed (49%), business will be the single most important actor in delivering the SDGs. Their major conclusion was that the private sector now has a window of opportunity to reshape the way we live and work. 6 Given the pervasive role of information and communication technology (ICT) and software solutions in all aspects of our society, it is obvious that researchers, practitioners, and decision makers in any sector need to change their mindset and include sustainability concerns by default. More on the technical side, the Smarter 2020 and Smarter 2030 reports by the Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI) presented what the future could look like by making the best of technological opportunities. GeSI's SMARTer2020 report 3 demonstrates how the increased use of ICT such as video conferencing and smart-building management could cut the projected 2020 global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 16.5%, amounting to $1.9 trillion in gross energy and fuel savings and a reduction of 9.1 gigatons carbon dioxide equivalent of greenhouse gases. This is equivalent to more than seven times the ICT sector's emissions in the same period. 3 Here, ICT can work as an enabler—if we have software engineers who know how to design for sustainability. In this special issue, we have, for example, contributions on design patterns and mobile cloud apps that support energy efficiency. In the Smarter 2030 report, policy makers, businesses, and consumers were called to action. By 2030, ICT will provide benefits across the triple bottom line, from reducing CO2 emissions and resource use, to generating additional revenues, cost savings, and wider societal benefits. The report includes scenarios like “a doctor in your pocket,” “education on your terms,” “decarbonizing the energy sector,” “the future of buildings,” “feeding a growing world,” “mobile and connected reaching your destination,” “smarter customers, smarter services,” and the Internet of Things. 4 Each of those is fundamentally realized and implemented by software systems, and again, we need software engineers capable of designing these systems with individual, social, economic, technical, and environmental sustainability in mind. Furthermore, each of these topics also depends on highly interdisciplinary collaborarion. For example, the “doctor in your pocket” requires both medical expertise, user experience design, and software engineering. Each discipline has to start building its half of the bridges towards the others. From the humanitarian perspective of MDGs and SDGs to the business perspective of the UN Global Compact study to the Smarter 2020 and 2030 future scenarios, all of the solutions involve large amounts of software systems and services. This is where software engineering comes into play as a critical facilitator. In more concrete terms, if we manage to support sustainability in business strategies, translate the related objectives into requirements, and then manage to design and implement them into the software, we can facilitate a huge potential positive impact on our lifestyle and the planet. In our opinion, the maturity of the field is still developing. In distinct research community pockets, we have advanced specific topics quite well. Now is the time to bring those research pockets together and integrate them into the bigger picture. This is what this special issue is about. The six papers part of this special issue showcase the diversity of the field of software engineering for sustainability. A way to emphasize this diversity is to show how they contribute to the different sustainability dimensions, as illustrated in Figure 1. There, we used the notation of the Software Sustainability Assessment Method (SoSA 14) and linked the software engineering contribution of each paper with the sustainability concerns that have been directly addressed (i.e., placed in the immediate impact area) as well as those that are indirectly enabled (i.e., in the enabling impact area). The focus of the papers goes from specific types of software systems (cloud based and mobile cloud), to software engineering techniques (patterns), approaches (release management and software product line engineering), and finally a code of ethics overarching the profession. Given the focus differences, the papers tackle sustainability in different dimensions. However, we observe that most papers directly focus on technical and environmental concerns, and only two papers directly address concerns related to social sustainability. This suggests that the community perceives sustainability as a “narrow" technical versus environmental problem. While energy efficiency is important, the sustainability impact of software in society requires a broader perspective addressing the socioeconomic problems, too. This of course calls for more interdisciplinary collaboration. We also elicited the types of concerns that are indirectly mentioned (or enabled) and could identify some concerns belonging to the social and economic dimensions. The following summarizes the papers in terms of both direct and enabled contribution to sustainability. In “Cloud Architecture Continuity: Change Models and Change Rules for Sustainable Cloud Software Architectures,” Pahl et al. propose a framework for cloud environments and for aiding technical sustainability in terms of longevity and resilience to uncertainty (as both evolution and adaptation). This, in turn, influences economic sustainability concerns like maintenance of capital and added value. The evaluation shows how the framework ensures cloud-based systems to continuously meet changing goals and change the architecture accordingly. In “BEFTIGRE: Behaviour-driven Full-tier Green Evaluation of Mobile Cloud Applications,” Chinenyeze et al. propose an approach that optimizes the energy consumption of applications that rely on a mobile cloud architecture. Past approaches aimed at saving the battery life of mobile devices by offloading data and/or computation to the cloud. Based on target behavioral scenarios that span the full mobile cloud tier, this work identifies the best-fitting offloading scheme in terms of energy usage, resource usage, and performance, hence balancing factors in the environmental and technical sustainability dimensions. In addition, the use of scenarios capturing, for example, the implications of a certain offloading scheme aids decision making of, and communication towards, business analysts. This can have an indirect positive effect toward business adoption, hence economic savings. In “Investigating the Effect of Design Patterns on Energy Consumption,” Feitosa et al. evaluate the impact on energy consumption of two GoF pattern solutions versus alternative solutions. While limited to two patterns and two OSS projects, this work shows that pattern solutions tend to be less energy efficient than alternative ones. This may suggest a trade-off between environmental concerns (software energy footprint) and socioeconomic advantages (pattern reusability across projects or application domains and development effort). While only energy consumption is being discussed, decision making should look at the broader picture, in this case at sociotechnical indicators, too. In “Energy efficiency on the Product Roadmap: an Empirical Study Across Releases of a Software Product,” Jagroep et al. present two empirical studies: an experiment on the energy impact of software change across two consecutive releases of an commercial software product and a subsequent semistructured interview showing how the quantification of software energy consumption helps to create awareness and include energy efficiency aspects in the decision-making process, when planning software releases. Experiment results contribute to technical-environmental sustainability by providing insights in how software design decisions impact energy consumption across releases. In addition, interview results contribute to social sustainability by creating awareness and by enabling strategic software product roadmapping by planning its evolution also in terms of energy efficiency. In “Uncovering Sustainability Concerns in Software Product Lines,” Groher et al. study how the software product line engineering (SPL) engineering approach helps addressing concerns that might be relevant for sustainability. In particular, as SPLs foster reuse of resources and controlled evolution, most of the identified sustainability concerns directly related to SPL engineering naturally belong to the economic dimension (e.g., time to market, productivity, and asset management) and the technical dimension (e.g., maintainability and scalability). In these dimensions, evolution and resource consumption over time are of the essence. Therefore, the next step is to apply this work in multiproduct analysis in a SPL engineering context, hence adding time-related sustainability analysis. In “GreCo: Green Code of ethics,” Moraga et al. propose a code of ethics for engineering green software. The authors directly cover what they call “green in software”, which regards the direct impact of software on relevant environmental concerns. However, as natural in a code of ethics, the work also provides reflection on the social impact of green software engineering, spanning from the relevance to the public to individual good practices. Similar to the work of Hankel et al.,7 it also addresses the impact for the employer and customer and from both product and process perspectives. Finally, we want to emphasize that many papers make their data (e.g., experiments' raw data, metrics, and measures) available for reproduction and replication of the results. This is crucial to stimulate the community towards replicating studies and share new findings. Overall, the knowledge resulting from all papers has relevance for both researchers and practitioners. The pervasive role of sustainability in engineering software has have a great impact on the international scientific software engineering community. As illustrated in Figure 2, since 2012, a number of workshops kickstarted software engineering research and helped shaping a strong, active, and innovative community with a strong presence in the main conferences in the field. The two international workshops with the longest history are RE4SuSy and GREENS, followed by WSSSPE and GinSEng. The Workshop on Requirements Engineering for Sustainable Systems (RE4SuSy) was established at REFSQ (www.refsq.org) and continued at RE since 2013. The main focus of RE4SuSy has been to improve requirements engineering techniques in a way that they better support the sustainability of software systems and the development of software systems for sustainability. The Workshop on Green and Sustainable Software (GREENS) was established at ICSE (http://icse-conferences.org). Its main focus has been to discuss academic research and industrial practice, about how software engineering methods, techniques, tools, and knowledge can contribute to developing sustainable software as well as software that supports sustainable processes. The Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE) started in 2013 and over the years developed into “an international community-driven organization that promotes sustainable research software by addressing challenges related to the full lifecycle of research software through shared learning and community action” (cf., http://wssspe.researchcomputing.org.uk/about-wssspe). The Workshop on Green in Software Engineering (GinSEng) started in 2015 and focused on the role of software engineering in and for greenability. Among other more specific initiatives, these efforts gave birth to the Software Engineering in Society (SEIS) track in the premier software engineering conference, ACM/IEEE ICSE, hence recognizing the pervasive societal role of software. It also witnessed the stable participation in broader and interdisciplinary conferences like ICT4S, where the software engineering community has the invaluable opportunity to discuss research ideas with colleagues from other disciplines. We take the opportunity to thank all workshop organizers that kickstarted the community, helped in building a stronger community with a stable place in international conferences, and that are joining forces as we speak (or, better, as we write) to converge in a new International Symposium on Sustainable Software Engineering, ISSSE, planned for 2019. Last but not least, we reiterate on the need to infuse software engineering education and professional training with the objective of sustainability—a blend of specifically dedicated sustainability courses and courses teaching technical competences for engineering sustainable software will provide the software industry with the right “software engineering for sustainability” instruments. We hope that readers will enjoy this special issue and gain useful insights from the six papers presented. Finally, we would like to thank the editorial board for providing us with the opportunity to devote this issue to this important topic. We also thank the reviewers for their invaluable help. Enjoy!

Credit / Debit card transactions are one of the most widely used means for purchasing items. As such, security is a critical concern in redesigning systems that can improve the security of those transactions, and the involvement of the future users is important. In this paper, we demonstrate the use of Requirement Engineering (RE) techniques to include the user's acceptance of the security decisions before implementation, designing for ease of use, and making them aware of and responsible for their own security. We illustrate the application of a set of RE artifacts to elicit specific requirements for the security of the Fortified Cards, a revamped design of current credit/debit cards that uses QR code.

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.

Background/Context: The objective of achieving higher sustainability in our lifestyles by information and communication technology has lead to a plethora of research activities in related fields. Consequently, Software Engineering for Sustainability (SE4S) has developed as an active area of research. Objective/Aim: Though SE4S gained much attention over the past few years and has resulted in a number of contributions, there is only one rigorous survey of the field. We follow up on this systematic mapping study from 2012 with a more in-depth overview of the status of research, as most work has been conducted in the last 4 years. Method: The applied method is a systematic mapping study through which we investigate which contributions were made, which knowledge areas are most explored, and which research type facets have been used, to distill a common understanding of the state-of-the-art in SE4S. Results: We contribute an overview of current research topics and trends, and their distribution according to the research type facet and the application domains. Furthermore, we aggregate the topics into clusters and list proposed and used methods, frameworks, and tools. Conclusion: The research map shows that impact currently is limited to few knowledge areas and there is need for a future roadmap to fill the gaps.

Teaching the discipline of requirements engineering (RE) is slowly establishing at universities within the software engineering curriculum. While several studies have shown that case study-based education was more efficient in RE, many teachers are still reluctant to change their teaching style, and stay with classical lectures and complementary exercises. These courses often fail to relate the different steps and stages of RE to each other and do not address crucial communication and project management issues that are common in industrial RE practice. They also miss the chance for using the classroom as a near-to-real-settings research lab, and won't show students the stakes existing in doing engineering in our society. We describe our experiences in teaching RE with a case study in two universities, achieving a triple-win: putting students in contact with real stakeholders, showing students their responsibility towards a sustainable world and doing empirical research in the classroom. We report on the course design, the evaluation, the lessons learned, and the potential success factors for such courses. We conclude that case study-based approaches to teaching RE considerably improve skills valued by industry, are feasible at a reasonable cost, and are enjoyable for the students, the teachers and the stakeholders. With this paper, we want to encourage RE educators to implement such courses in their setting.

Artefact-based requirements engineering (RE) describes the idea of establishing a company-wide RE reference model by putting the focus on the RE artefacts and their dependencies rather than dictating a strict process with interconnected methods. Previously conducted case studies already strengthen our confidence in certain advantages and shortcomings of the paradigm. Still, our case studies by now remain isolated focussing on particular socio-economic contexts and, thus, the findings can hardly be generalised. Therefore, we need further replications. In this paper, we contribute the design of a replication case study to better understand the impact of artefact-based requirements engineering and, as a long term goal, strengthen an initial theory of expectation we could already infer from results and experiences we made in previous case studies. The replications shall lead to a reliable empirical base due to comparability among the studies. This allows for a (still restricted) generalisability of conclusions on artefact-based requirements engineering.

A body of knowledge is a term used to represent the complete set of concepts, terms and activities that make up a professional domain. It encompasses the core teachings, skills and research in a field or industry. So far, the discipline of RE is lacking an official Requirements Engineering Body of Knowledge (REBoK). This working session brings together researchers and practitioners to elaborate the goals, requirements and constraints for a REBoK that shall serve as commonly agreed basis for developing a draft over the following months.

Background: Little is yet known about how to qualitatively analyse development processes to steer their further optimisation. Thereby, companies are often left to the expertise of third parties when performing such an analysis. Aim: We aim at elaborating a way of empirically analysing development processes on basis of 9 empirical studies we performed at our research group. Method: We analyse 9 empirical studies for commonalities in their research objectives, research methodologies, cases, and methods used to infer a set of research methodology patterns. Results: We discover and discuss three methodology patterns, which we embed into a first experience-based guideline to conduct qualitative analyses of development processes. Conclusion: Our guideline is inferred from a series of successful studies. However, since qualitative analyses always will depend on many aspects that cannot be standardised, we lay with this contribution a first, but fundamental step to be further discussed, evaluated, and extended.

Background: Supporting sustainability in software engineering is becoming an active area of research. We want to contribute the first Systematic Literature Review(SLR) in this field to aid researchers who are motivated to contribute to that topic by providing a body of knowledge as starting point, because we know from own experience, this search can be tedious and time consuming. Aim: We aim to provide an overview of different aspects of sustainability in software engineering research with regard to research activity, investigated topics, identified limitations, proposed approaches, used methods, available studies, and considered domains. Method: The applied method is a SLR in five reliable and commonly-used databases according to the (quasi-standard) protocol by Kitchenham et al. [1]. We assessed the 100 first results of each database ordered by relevance with respect to the search query. Results: Of 500 classified publications, we regard 96 as relevant for our research questions. We sketch a taxonomy of their topics and domains, and provide lists of used methods and proposed approaches. Most of the excluded publications were ruled out because of an unfitting usage of terms within the search query. Conclusions: Currently, there is little research coverage on the different aspects of sustainability in software engineering while other disciplines are already more active. Future work includes extending the study by reviewing a higher number of publications, including dedicated journal and workshop searches, and snowballing.

Sustainability is becoming an important topic in IT - as contribution of IT to safeguard our future, and as evolving market segment. IT's high productivity in combination with short life cycles and, on the other hand, growing resource problems of our planet, lead to a necessity that software engineers take their share of responsibility for sustainability. Therefore, we need to include the concept of sustainability into the university curriculum of computer science. The challenge is to motivate and interest students (and lecturers) for sustainability, to identify spheres of activity for software engineers, to build up competence fields for solutions, and to incorporate the topic into the syllabus. This paper presents a strategy for integrating the concept of sustainability into a degree course scheme across three stages: find a core of interested people by offering a seminar, then broaden the awareness for sustainability by offering a lecture series, and finally establish the topic by offering teach-the-teacher seminars and integration into software engineering lectures.

[Background:] Nowadays, industries are facing the problem that the Requirements Engineering (RE) process is highly volatile, since it depends on project influences from the customer's domain or from process models used. Artefact-based approaches promise to provide guidance in the creation of consistent artefacts in volatile project environments, because these approaches concentrate on the artefacts and their dependencies, instead of prescribing processes. Yet missing, however, is empirical evidence on the advantages of applying artefact-based RE approaches in real projects. [Aim:] We developed a customisable artefact-based RE approach for the domain of business information systems. Our goal is to investigate the advantages and limitations of applying this customisable approach in an industrial context. [Method:] We conduct a case study with our artefact-based RE approach and its customisation procedure. For this, we apply it at a software development project at Siemens following the steps of the customisation procedure. We assess our approach in direct comparison with the previously used RE approach considering possible improvements in the process and in the quality of the produced artefacts. [Results:] We show that our approach is flexible enough to respond to the individual needs in the analysed project environment. Although the approach is not rated to be more productive, we find an improvement in the syntactic and the semantic quality of the created artefacts. [Conclusions:] We close a gap in the RE literature by giving empirical evidence on the advantages of artefact orientation in RE in an industrial setting.