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。支撑关键的技术、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种情况。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长，需要新的视角和方法来识别、衡量和评估整个系统生命周期中工程决策的系统影响。这需要考虑正在设计的系统与它们所嵌入的环境之间的相互作用，因为关键的影响只有在这些相互作用中才会随着时间的推移而出现。*可持续发展的挑战使这一点成为当务之急。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是非常不同的。然而，在系统设计中，这些类型的系统之间的联系需要在几个层面上同时考虑生态、技术、社会和经济方面的考虑，并理解在其背景下集成的软件系统。*可持续发展已成为“21世纪的非功能性需求”。然而，软件工程师没有足够的能力来解决这个问题：在发现、评估和管理关键决策对可持续性的影响方面，严重缺乏强大的技术、模型和衡量标准。目前尚不清楚纳入可持续性如何改变既定的进程，需要哪些新的活动，以及如何衡量其有效性。对未来系统价值产生负面影响的工程决策的隐藏影响仍未被发现。*拟议的研究计划建立在我对用于数字保存的软件系统进行系统评估的工作基础上，这些软件系统可以缓解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发展需求，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。我们的流程模型将使团队能够评估和改进其可持续系统开发的能力。实证研究将被用来评估我们的结果，并建立软件工程可持续发展的理论账户。*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敞口，并使加拿大公司将自己定位在软件工程可持续发展的前沿。

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.