Seminar: Sustainability in Software Engineering

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 sus- tainability, to identify spheres of activity for software engineers, to build up competence fields for solutions, and to incorporate the topic into the syllabus. The first step is to find a core of interested people by offering a seminar. Our guiding goal is to bring the topic of sustainability to a broader recognition in software engineering. Our orientation goals is to motivate students for the topic of sustainability. Our coarse-grained goal is to explore the areas of sustainability related to software engineering. Our detailed goal is to let the students explore one topic in depth to interactively present it to the other students. This report presents the results of our first Bachelor seminar on “Sustainabil- ity in Software Engineering” held in the summer term of 2011. The deliverables to be developed by the students were a learning module of 90min prepared by each student as final presentation and the documentation of the learning module in an essay (content of this report). The topics were: 1: What is Sustainability? 2: Sustainability in Legislation 3: Greenwashing 4: Sustainable Software Engineering 5: Case Study Green Energy 6: Case Study Internet 7: Green Car IT      «

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...     »