Sustainability debt: A metaphor to support Sustainability design decisions

Stefanie Betz, Christoph Becker, Ruzanna Chitchyan, Leticia Duboc, Steve M. Easterbrook, Birgit Penzenstadler, Norbert Seyff, Colin C. Venters

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingOther chapter contribution

9 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Sustainability, the capacity to endure, is fundamental for the societies on our planet. Despite its increasing recognition in software engineering, it remains difficult to assess the delayed systemic effects of decisions taken in requirements engineering and systems design. To support this difficult task, this paper introduces the concept of sustainability debt. The metaphor helps in the discovery, documentation, and communication of sustainability issues in requirements engineering. We build on the existing metaphor of technical debt and extend it to four other dimensions of sustainability to help think about sustainabilityaware software systems engineering. We highlight the meaning of debt in each dimension and the relationships between those dimensions. Finally, we discuss the use of the metaphor and explore how it can help us to design sustainability-aware software

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationRE4SuSy Workshop
Pages55-63
Number of pages9
Volume1416
Publication statusPublished - 2015
Event4th International Workshop on Requirements Engineering for Sustainable Systems, RE4SuSy 2015 - co-located with the 23rd IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference, RE 2015 - Ottawa, Canada
Duration: 24 Aug 2015 → …

Publication series

NameCEUR Workshop Proceedings
PublisherCEUR Workshop Proceedings
ISSN (Print)1613-0073

Conference

Conference4th International Workshop on Requirements Engineering for Sustainable Systems, RE4SuSy 2015 - co-located with the 23rd IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference, RE 2015
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityOttawa
Period24/08/15 → …

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2015 for this paper by its authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes.

Research Groups and Themes

  • Bristol Interaction Group

Keywords

  • Debt
  • Design decisions
  • Metaphor
  • Requirements
  • Sustainability

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