Sustainability Design in software and information systems engineering

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Modern society's heavy reliance on software results in increasing vulnerability to the obsolescence and depreciation of critical software-dependent assets. This is exacerbated by the prominence of ultra-large-scale systems underpinning critical technical, social, scientific and economic infrastructure. As software is embedded in the social and technical fabric of our society, the rising importance of long-term concerns requires new perspectives and methods for identifying, measuring and assessing systemic effects of engineering decisions across the systems lifecycle. This requires a consideration of the interactions of the systems under design with the context in which they are embedded, since crucial effects emerge only in these interactions over time. ******The challenges of sustainability bring this to the forefront. The sustainability of a software system its “capacity to endure” is very different from the capacity of a socio-economic or natural system to endure. In systems design however, the connections between these types of systems require a simultaneous consideration of ecological, technical, social, and economic concerns on several levels, and an understanding of software systems integrated in their context. ***Sustainability has emerged as “the non-functional requirement of the 21st century.” Yet, software engineers are ill-equipped to address it: There is a profound lack of robust techniques, models and metrics for discovering, assessing, and managing the effects of key decisions on sustainability. It is not clear how incorporating sustainability changes established processes, which new activities it requires, and how to measure their effectiveness. Hidden effects of engineering decisions that negatively affect future system value remain undiscovered.******The proposed research program builds on my work on systematic evaluation of software systems for digital preservation that mitigate long-term risks to the sustainability of information assets, such as obsolescence. ***We will develop risk indicators and flexible tools that enable software engineers to identify, model and visualize sustainability requirements and integrate this into software architecture assessment throughout the systems lifecycle. We will enable evidence sharing and assess the effectiveness of digital preservation techniques in reducing the technical debt of exemplary systems through case studies. Our process models will enable teams to assess and improve their capabilities for sustainable systems development. Empirical studies will be used to evaluate our results and build a theoretical account of sustainability in software engineering.******By developing innovative ways to sustainable systems development, we will reduce the risk exposure of software and information systems and enable Canadian companies to position themselves at the forefront of sustainability in software engineering.