A Sustainability Catalogue for Software Modelling

• Autor(a) principal: Albuquerque, Diogo Henrique de Jesus Lopes
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/103842
• topic: Sustainable development; sustainability dimensions; requirements engineering; software development; sustainability requirements; trade-off analysis; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Engenharia Eletrotécnica, Eletrónica e Informática

Sustainable development is the development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the needs of our future generations. It covers five different dimensions: environmental, economic, social, technical, and individual. Such dimensions are also of interest for software. For example, memory and power efficiency have an impact on the environmental dimension, the reduction of costs in software development and evolution relates to the economic dimension, the use of software for general improvement of people’s lives affects the social dimension, the software’s ability to cooperate with other systems impacts the technical dimension, and the improvement of well-being of individuals relates to the individual dimension. These various dimensions and their properties impact on each other and 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 development. The objective of this dissertation is to propose a catalog of sustainability requirements for later reuse during the software development process. The envisioned solution involves using requirement engineering activities to address sustainability in the early stages of the software development. The first step towards a solution was to perform a (agile) systematic mapping study in order to gain a complete and profound knowledge about the existing sustainability and requirement engineering techniques. This study was the base of our work. Our final artifact is a sustainability catalogue. This catalogue addresses four out of the five dimensions of sustainability, as well as their qualities and relationships. We did not treat the individual dimension, for sake of simplicity and time constraints, although we consider that some of its properties are included in the social dimension. The catalogue was developed using the iStar framework, and it was implemented in the piStar Tool. Such catalogue offers a generic approach that can be instantiated for particular application domains, and for any combination of dimensions. Hence, this work will contribute to the field of sustainable software development.