A Sustainability Requirements Catalogue for Software Modelling
Oct 2021
Sustainability poses key challenges in software development. Most existing works understand the concept as yet another non-functional requirement. We argue that sustainability goes beyond a non-functional requirement, or more precisely, a quality attribute. In this paper, we will look at sustainability as a complex composite quality attribute and will focus on three commonly agreed dimensions of sustainability: environmental, social and economical. The goal is to contribute with a reusable sustainability software requirements catalogue. We started by performing a systematic mapping to elicit sustainability requirements and approaches. Next, we analysed the extracted sustainability-related properties and relationships, synthesised the results in feature models, used iStar to model the catalog, and implemented a tool with several operations on the sustainability catalogue. This catalogue can be instantiated for particular application domains. The resulting work was qualitatively evaluated regarding readability, interest, utility, and usefulness of the sustainability catalogue with 50 participants from the domain. The results were encouraging, showing that, in average, 79% of the respondents "Agree" or "Strongly agree" that the catalogue endorses the quality criteria evaluated.
