Sustainability Knowledge about Software Parts in Software Engineering Processes

Abstract

The ecological and sustainable design, implementation and configuration of software is a rather difficult task these days. Practical guidelines and helpful hints to assist software architects, programmers, and operators in their daily business are still rare. This paper discusses a basic strategy for tackling this problem. It pays special attention to the aspect that modern software applications usually intensively make use of third-party components. Though the relations between these so-called "parts" are manifold, the proposed "software information leaflet" approach might give an idea on how operational support tools could be designed strategically. Finally, the paper lists open research questions addressing the aforementioned issues. Aspects that still have to be examined relate to knowledge modeling, the development of appropriate information encodings, as well as pragmatic utilization aspects.

An Ecological View on Software Reuse

“…These concerns should increase proportionally with the level of infiltration of ICT in economic and social life. They need to be analysed in accordance with the definition and characteristics of green software [17] [18] [19]. In order to manage software reuse efficiently, the next section identifies and analyses ecological elements that must be considered in software reuse processes.…”

Assessing the Sustainability Performance of Sustainability Management Software

“…Indeed, based on the abilities and characteristics of software, the hardware capacities are determined, affecting the resource consumption during its usage phase (e.g., of end-user devices, networks and data centers [21]). In order to assess sustainability of software, the first step is to define and characterize sustainable software products [19,[22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29]. This paper builds on the definition of sustainable software by Dick et al [30] that sustainable software positively contributes to sustainable development including its economic, societal and environmental effects and is sustainable itself.…”