A Generic Model for Sustainability

Motivation: Software systems as we know them have either a primary eco- nomic purpose or fulfil human or social needs of their users. The economic purpose is analysed in depth by the economy itself; the latter goals are analysed in software engineering by service orientation and usability analysis. Yet, as software systems are involved in nearly all daily business and non- business processes they also have an impact on resources and environment. Hence, besides economic, human and social goals, environmental sustainability should be a major goal for software development projects. Problem: Without a tangible definition and applicable guidance, sustainabil- ity remains an unreachable ideal. Therefore, we need a definition and a concrete decomposition of sustainability to make it tangible for software systems development. In addition, due to second and third order effects, it is not sufficient to analyse environmental sustainbility on its own, but its interplay with economic, social, human and technical sustainability in order to define appropriate actions and understand their effects. Principal idea: We analyse the dimensions of sustainability, their values with respective indicators, and activities to support them. These elements are composed to a conceptual model that allows for analysis as well as constructing an outline of actions both for a company or a product point of view. Contribution: We propose a generic sustainability model with a meta model and with illustrating instances for companies and projects that are taken from various case studies. By building an tangible model we make these effects explicit and thus enable analysis, support and assessment of environmental sustainability in software engineering in a broad view.     «

Motivation: Software systems as we know them have either a primary eco- nomic purpose or fulfil human or social needs of their users. The economic purpose is analysed in depth by the economy itself; the latter goals are analysed in software engineering by service orientation and usability analysis. Yet, as software systems are involved in nearly all daily business and non- business processes they also have an impact on resources and environment. Hence, besides economic, human and social goals,...     »