Abstract-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.

Abstract-The critical role that software plays in society demands a paradigm shift in the mindset of Software Engineering. The focus of this shift begins in Requirements Engineering.

Abstract-Sustainability is now a major concern in society, but there is little understanding of how it is perceived by software engineering professionals and how sustainability design can become an embedded part of software engineering process. This paper presents the results of a qualitative study exploring requirements engineering practitioners' perceptions and attitudes towards sustainability. It identifies obstacles and mitigation strategies regarding the application of sustainability design principles in daily work life. The results of this study reveal several factors that can prevent sustainability design from becoming a first class citizen in software engineering: software practitioners tend to have a narrow understanding of the concept of sustainability; organizations show limited awareness of its potential opportunities and benefits; and the norms in the discipline are not conducive to sustainable outcomes. These findings suggest the need for focused efforts in sustainability education, but also a need to rethink professional norms and practices.

The term scalability appears frequently in computing literature, but it is a term that is poorly defined and poorly understood. The lack of a clear, consistent and systematic treatment of scalability makes it difficult to evaluate claims of scalability and to compare claims from different sources. This paper presents a framework for precisely characterizing and analyzing the scalability of a software system. The framework treats scalability as a multi-criteria optimization problem and captures the dependency relationships that underlie typical notions of scalability. The paper presents the results of a case study in which the framework and analysis method were applied to a real-world system, demonstrating that it is possible to develop a precise, systematic characterization of scalability and to use the characterization to compare the scalability of alternative system designs.

Software Engineering helps deliver software systems that can enable humanity to reach new levels of prosperity. That experience in building complex, interdependent and globally distributed systems can also be leveraged for sustainability challenges. Humanity faces a number of global, interdependent, and complex challenges that present a risk to societies, including climate change, large scale involuntary migration, and poverty [18]. As software professionals, we can contribute to sustainability through the software systems that we engineer, and it is our social responsibility to do so [21]. But sustainability problems are complex system problems (see SIDEBAR Sustainability). How can we understand the complex dynamics that arise in the interaction within multifaceted social, economic, or ecological systems? One approach to identifying successful sustainability interventions is to consider leverage pointslocations within a system where a small change in one aspect can result in signi icant system-wide changes [10]. This article suggests leverage points (LP) can help software engineers to address sustainability challenges by offering insights on possible transformation mechanisms and/or ways to ind alternatives. While LP will not tell us exactly how to act on sustainability challenges, they provide an analysis tool to help practitioners to identify elements that can bring about effective change at different levels, for a (software) system and the wider system it resides in. As sustainability is a crosscutting (orthogonal) concern, LPs are bene icial as they enable intervention on different levels. We use the example of the UK public transportation system [23] to illustrate how leverage points can contribute to software engineering for sustainability. SIDEBAR Sustainability The Oxford English Dictionary [13] de ines sustainability as 'the capacity to endure'. The Brundtland commission de ined sustainable development as 'meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs' [3]. However, to understand the broader sustainability issues, we must ask which system to sustain, for whom, over which time frame, and at what cost [16]. This involves ive interrelated dimensions [2]: • The individual dimension covers individual freedom and agency, human dignity, and ful illment. It includes individuals' ability to thrive, exercise their rights, and develop freely. • The social dimension covers relationships between individuals and groups. It covers the structures of mutual trust and communication in a social system and the balance between con licting interests. • The economic dimension covers inancial aspects and business value. It includes capital growth and liquidity, investment questions, and inancial operations. • The technical dimension covers the ability to maintain and evolve arti icial systems (such as software) over time. It refers to maintenance and evolution, resilience, and the ease of system transitions. • The environmental dimension covers the use and stewardsh...

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In the last years, the field of creativity for requirements engineering has received a growing interest from researchers and practitioners. This paper presents a mapping study to aggregate literature in this field. The motivation is to identify trends and research opportunities in the application of creativity approaches to support the requirements engineering. The mapping study analyzed 46 papers. The results show four main research groups working on creativity in RE. Requirements elicitation is the phase concentrating the majority of studies. The study confirms that creativity techniques enhance creative thinking in requirements activities. However, creative thinking strategies should be fully integrated in current requirements engineering processes, methods and tools.

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