Software Engineering for Sustainability: Tools for Sustainability Analysis

Sustainability is a central objective for systems development because, according to Rockström et al. (2009), humanity has exceeded the planet’s boundaries for safe operation. Software systems are present in almost all aspects of our daily lives, therefore software systems can help to transition towards sustainability by acting as agents of change. If software engineers want to include sustainability as a new objective into their systems, it needs to be reflected in the requirements; therefore this may have significant impact on how software developers perform requirements engineering and systems design. However, software engineers lack practical guidelines on how to perform a sustainability analysis for a system while in discussion with customers. The key focus of this chapter is bridging the sustainability analysis gap in software engineering.