A Sustainability-Driven Approach for Agile Software Requirements

• Autor(a) principal: Mendes, Salvador Rosa
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/145192
• topic: sustainable software; sustainability requirements; agile methodologies; user stories; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Engenharia Eletrotécnica, Eletrónica e Informática

The SDGs (sustainable development goals) demand for the involvement of all sectors of our society, from industry to academia. Therefore, the race towards sustainability has become increasingly more important and widely covered. Sustainability involves five different dimensions: environmental, economic, social, technical and individual. These dimensions are also of interest for software development since they have an impact not only on each other but also on the base requirements of a system. Therefore, well-informed design decisions require improved support to reason on such intra- and inter-relationships and impacts, early in the development. We are interested in reasoning about these relationships in an agile context where user stories play a major role, but do not handle sustainability requirements in a methodical way. For this purpose, our first step was to understand how developers from the agile community handled sustainability. The second step was to perform a systematic mapping study where we furthered our understanding of sustainability, and software development with agile methodologies. With this study we also gained awareness concerning any approaches that have been proposed regarding the integration of sustainability in an agile context. This study is the foundation for the third part of our work: a solution that consists in extending and adapting an existing catalogue of sustainability requirements into a catalogue of sustainability user stories for later reuse during the early stages of an agile software development process. We validated the approach with a case study (U-Bike) and performed an online survey for qualitative evaluation of the proposed approach.