Using Participatory Technical-action-research to validate a Software Sustainability Model

Abstract

—[Context and Motivation] In the last years, software engineering researchers have contributed to defining the notion of sustainability-aware software as a quality requirement. [Question/problem] The field is, however, still missing instruments supporting the design and assessment of software sustainability. [Objective] This research aims at providing a validated Sustainability Assessment Framework (SAF) through a long-term empirical study in close-collaboration with the software industry. [Methodology] By using the participatory technical action-research method, we validate the sustainability-quality model, one of the instruments of the SAF framework, by means of investigating its applicability in an industrial software project and detecting potential improvements. [Results] Our results confirm the effective applicability of our model as most of its quality attributes (QAs) have been either addressed in the software project or acknowledged as relevant. The action-research method was also very useful for enriching our model by identifying QAs missing in the model (e.g. regulation compliance, data privacy). [Contribution] The sustainability-quality model can be effectively used as an instrument for identifying sustainability-quality requirements, and creating awareness on the relevance of the multidimensional sustainability nature of certain quality attributes.