Abstract:

Current software engineers will practice in a world of global climate change with reduced resources, in the context of an increasing competitive and concurrent software market and a desire to resist to economic crisis and crucial concurrency. In short, they will work in a world where sustainability is key to innovation and success. However software engineers haven’t a comprehemsive understanding of how to integrate sustainability into their software systems. There is often an intellectual barrier because of the interdisciplinary nature of sustainability in addition to the extra effort and required techniques needed. Unlike security and quality, there is neither consensus on a set of sustainability concepts on which to base guidelines and approaches nor a standardized mechanism for assessing software sustainability. Software engineering lacks rigorous assessment tools to judge the success of sustainability integration in software systems. Development of a software sustainability recommender system can help software engineering faculty identify and structure sustainability-related alternatives, develop methods to incorporate these solutions into software systems, and assess sustainability of existing systems. This paper proposes a preliminary architecture of a software sustainability recommender system designed to make software engineers aware of existing techniques and guidelines to integrate sustainable alternatives in software products.