Sustainable software engineering: a perspective of individual sustainability

Abstract

Sustainable software engineering is a mean of developing sustainable software with sustainable software engineering process activities while balancing its various dimensions for instance economic, environmental, social, technical and individual. It is conveyed that the economic, technical, environmental and social dimensions are explored to satisfactory degree however the individual dimension of sustainable software engineering which is concerned with wellbeing of software engineers is not explored to satisfactory degree with respect to its understanding and challenges. Therefore, the aim of the study is to highlight and prioritize the challenges regarding individual sustainability dimension. The study also provides the mitigation strategies for the top five individual sustainability challenges. The systematic literature review has been performed to report the challenges and mitigation strategies. The study finding shows that lack of domain knowledge, lack of methodologies and tool support, lack of education, varying and unidentified situations and lack of sustainable software engineering practices are top most challenges regarding individual sustainability. These challenges need an urgent attention to achieve the goal of sustainable software engineering. The study also reports various mitigation strategies to overcome the risk of identified top most individual sustainability challenges such as to introduce sustainable software engineering education and knowledge in software engineering curricula, development of knowledge sharing frameworks and awareness regarding unclear and varying situations for each software engineering activity etc. The study will be beneficial for sustainable software engineering body of knowledge, sustainable software engineering practitioners and researchers by providing classified list of individual sustainability challenges and their mitigation strategies.