Sustainability Design in software and information systems engineering

现代社会对软件的严重依赖，导致依赖软件的关键资产越来越容易过时和贬值。支撑关键技术、社会、科学和经济基础设施的超大规模系统的突出地位加剧了这一问题。随着软件嵌入到我们社会的社会和技术结构中，长期关注的重要性日益增加，需要新的视角和方法来识别，测量和评估整个系统生命周期中工程决策的系统影响。这就需要考虑设计中的系统与它们所嵌入的环境之间的相互作用，因为随着时间的推移，关键的影响只会出现在这些相互作用中。 可持续性的挑战将这一点推到了最前沿。软件系统的可持续性--它的“承受能力”--与社会经济或自然系统的承受能力有很大的不同。然而，在系统设计中，这些类型的系统之间的连接需要同时考虑生态，技术，社会和经济问题的几个层面，并在其上下文中集成的软件系统的理解。 可持续性已成为“21世纪世纪的非功能性要求”。然而，软件工程师没有能力解决这个问题：他们严重缺乏强大的技术、模型和指标来发现、评估和管理关键决策对可持续发展的影响。目前尚不清楚如何将可持续性纳入既定进程，需要开展哪些新活动，以及如何衡量这些活动的有效性。工程决策对未来系统价值产生负面影响的隐藏效应仍未被发现。 拟议的研究计划建立在我对数字保存软件系统进行系统评估的基础上，这些软件系统可以减轻信息资产可持续性的长期风险，例如过时。 我们将开发风险指标和灵活的工具，使软件工程师能够识别、建模和可视化可持续性需求，并将其整合到整个系统生命周期的软件架构评估中。我们将通过案例研究实现证据共享，并评估数字保存技术在减少示范系统技术债务方面的有效性。我们的过程模型将使团队能够评估和提高他们的可持续系统开发能力。实证研究将被用来评估我们的结果，并建立一个在软件工程的可持续性的理论帐户。 通过开发可持续系统开发的创新方法，我们将减少软件和信息系统的风险，使加拿大公司能够在软件工程的可持续性方面处于领先地位。

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.