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Software Engineering Development and Applications for Sustainability

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Sustainable Engineering and Science".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 June 2022) | Viewed by 17871

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
1. Informatics and Digitalization, Molde University College –Specialized University in Logistics, 6410 Molde, Norway
Department of Software Engineering, Atilim University, 06830 İncek, Turkey
Interests: software engineering; information systems; digitalization; artificial intelligence

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Guest Editor
Alarcos Research Group. Departamento de Tecnologías y Sistemas de Información. University of Castilla-La Mancha, 13080 Ciudad Real, Spain
Interests: green software; software sustainability; software engineering; information systems

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Guest Editor
Alarcos Research Group. Departamento de Tecnologías y Sistemas de Información. University of Castilla-La Mancha, 13071 Ciudad Real, Spain
Interests: green software; software sustainability; software engineering

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Guest Editor
Department of Computer Science (IDI), NTNU – Norwegian University Of Science and Technology, Gjøvik 2815, Norway
Interests: software quality; health informatics; cybersecurity of critical infrastructure; agile methods; requirement engineering; software measurement and metrics; global software engineering and computing education

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Guest Editor
Software Engineering, Lappeenranta University of Technology, FI-53851 Lappeenranta, Finland
Interests: software for sustainability; innovation; technologies and approaches for communications; networks (social; technical; business)
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Software has become an integral part of our everyday life and is gradually impacting human beings and society. Climate change risk and environmental degeneration are the most critical issues facing our society. Therefore, environmental concerns should be addressed in software and information system development, implementation, and operation. Sustainable Software engineering is an emerging paradigm and significant for society in terms of the environment. The present industrial production and more and more use of information technology endanger prospective sustainability and lead to environmental problems. Sustainable software engineering is based on the foundation of designing and developing software by taking into consideration various dimensions of sustainability, economic, environmental, individual, social, and technical. Sustainability dimensions (social, individual, environmental, economic, and technical) are interwoven with functions and constraints of any given socio-technical system, and mutually interdependent, and contextualized by the ethical and legal norms and social practices.

The United Nations Agenda 2030 for sustainable development lays out the global and local challenges mankind is facing with a view to the needed transformation towards sustainable development. Software now plays a crucially significant role in environmental and energy areas. Organizations are beginning to understand that not only cost efficiency, but also long-term and continued prosperity can be gained from sustainability. Therefore, apart from factors like cost, time, and quality, sustainability has also become a significant objective to achieve when developing, configuring, operating, and implementing software systems.

Besides aspects related to how the software can be sustainable, there is another fundamental aspect that must be taken into account: making society (all the software stakeholders) aware of the substantial impact that software has on the environment. When software sustainability becomes a real milestone for everyone, it will be possible to move forward, and advance and integrate sustainability as a factor during software development. End-users can make a difference; if they ask for sustainable software, vendors and the software industry will incorporate it into the business processes.

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue presents a collection of papers of original advances in sustainability and software engineering drive by industry, practitioners, and academics working in this area, and also related to the social awareness of the impact of software.

Prof. Dr. Alok Mishra
Prof. Dr. Coral Calero
Dr. Mª Ángeles Moraga
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Deepti Mishra
Prof. Dr. Jari Porras
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • sustainable software
  • sustainable software engineering
  • sustainable software development
  • sustainable requirements engineering
  • sustainable software architecture and design
  • sustainability in software process, evolution, and maintenance
  • sustainability assessment in software development
  • sustainable software engineering education
  • green software engineering
  • green information technology
  • green information system
  • sustainable information technology practices
  • software sustainability awareness
  • software sustainability and society
  • software sustainability roi
  • economical aspects of software sustainability
  • social aspects of software sustainability stakeholders

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Published Papers (4 papers)

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Research

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23 pages, 2893 KiB  
Article
An Exploratory Study of Software Sustainability at Early Stages of Software Development
by Hira Noman, Naeem Ahmed Mahoto, Sania Bhatti, Hamad Ali Abosaq, Mana Saleh Al Reshan and Asadullah Shaikh
Sustainability 2022, 14(14), 8596; https://doi.org/10.3390/su14148596 - 14 Jul 2022
Cited by 9 | Viewed by 3178
Abstract
Sustainability incorporation within the field of Software Engineering is an emerging research area. Sustainability, from an academic perspective, has been addressed to a large extent. However, when it comes to the software industry, the topic has not received much-needed attention. Software, being designed [...] Read more.
Sustainability incorporation within the field of Software Engineering is an emerging research area. Sustainability, from an academic perspective, has been addressed to a large extent. However, when it comes to the software industry, the topic has not received much-needed attention. Software, being designed and developed in the industry, can benefit society at large, if sustainability is taken into account by the software professionals during the software design and development process. To develop a sustainable software application, knowledge and awareness about sustainability by professional software developers is one of the key elements. This study is an attempt to examine sustainability knowledge, importance, and support from the perspective of South Asian software professionals. Additionally, this study also proposes sustainability guidelines for certain software applications and also a catalog for the identification of sustainability requirements for different software applications. The queries such as ‘What does sustainability mean to a professional software developer?’, ‘How does the software industry identify sustainability requirements?’, ‘How do software developers incorporate the sustainability parameters within software during software development?’, and many other such queries are addressed in this study. To achieve this goal, a survey was carried out among 221 industry practitioners involved in software projects in various application domains such as banking, finance, and management applications. The results pinpoint that even though sustainability is deemed important by 91% of practitioners, still there is a lack of understanding regarding sustainability incorporation in software development. A total of 48% of professionals often misunderstand “Green software” as “sustainable software”. The technical aspect of sustainability is considered most important by professionals (67%) as well as companies (77%). One of the key findings of this study is that 92% of software practitioners are not able to identify sustainability requirements for software applications. The outcomes of the study may be regarded as an initial attempt towards how sustainability is comprehended in software by the South Asian software industry. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Software Engineering Development and Applications for Sustainability)
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26 pages, 1562 KiB  
Article
Simulation and Analysis Approaches to Microgrid Systems Design: Emerging Trends and Sustainability Framework Application
by Daniel Akinyele, Abraham Amole, Elijah Olabode, Ayobami Olusesi and Titus Ajewole
Sustainability 2021, 13(20), 11299; https://doi.org/10.3390/su132011299 - 13 Oct 2021
Cited by 7 | Viewed by 3725
Abstract
Energy systems modelling and design are a critical aspect of planning and development among researchers, electricity planners, infrastructure developers, utilities, decision-makers, and other relevant stakeholders. However, to achieve a sustainable energy supply, the energy planning approach needs to integrate some key dimensions. Importantly, [...] Read more.
Energy systems modelling and design are a critical aspect of planning and development among researchers, electricity planners, infrastructure developers, utilities, decision-makers, and other relevant stakeholders. However, to achieve a sustainable energy supply, the energy planning approach needs to integrate some key dimensions. Importantly, these dimensions are necessary to guide the simulation and evaluation. It is against this backdrop that this paper focuses on the simulation and analysis approaches for sustainable planning, design, and development of microgrids based on clean energy resources. The paper first provides a comprehensive review of the existing simulation tools and approaches used for designing energy generation technologies. It then discusses and compares the traditional strategies and the emerging trends in energy systems simulation based on the software employed, the type of problem to be solved, input parameters provided, and the expected output. The paper introduces a practical simulation framework for sustainable energy planning, which is based on the social-technical-economic-environmental-policy (STEEP) model. The STEEP represents a holistic sustainability model that considers the key energy systems planning dimensions compared to the traditional techno-economic model used in several existing simulation tools and analyses. The paper provides insights into data-driven analysis and energy modelling software development applications. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Software Engineering Development and Applications for Sustainability)
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33 pages, 7696 KiB  
Article
Agile Beeswax: Mobile App Development Process and Empirical Study in Real Environment
by Hazem Abdelkarim Alrabaiah and Nuria Medina-Medina
Sustainability 2021, 13(4), 1909; https://doi.org/10.3390/su13041909 - 10 Feb 2021
Cited by 6 | Viewed by 4616
Abstract
Mobile application development is a highly competitive environment; agile methodologies can enable teams to provide value faster, with higher quality and predictability, and a better attitude to deal with the continuous changes that will arise in the mobile context application (App), and the [...] Read more.
Mobile application development is a highly competitive environment; agile methodologies can enable teams to provide value faster, with higher quality and predictability, and a better attitude to deal with the continuous changes that will arise in the mobile context application (App), and the positive impact of that on sustainable development through continuous progress. App development is different from other types of software. For this reason, our objective is to present a new agile-based methodology for app development that we call Agile Beeswax. Agile Beeswax is conceived after identifying the mobile development process’s issues and challenges, and unique requirements. Agile Beeswax is an incremental, iterative development process composed of two main iterative loops (sprints), the incremental design loop and the incremental development loop, and one bridge connecting these two sprints. Agile Beeswax is structured in six phases, idea and strategy, user experience design, user interface design, design to development, handoff and technical decisions, development, and deployment and monitoring. One of its main strengths is that it has been created with academic and business perspectives to bring these two communities closer. To achieve this purpose, our research methodology comprises four main phases: Phase 1: Extensive literature review of mobile development methodologies, Phase 2: Interviews with mobile application developers working in small to medium software companies, Phase 3: Survey to extract valuable knowledge about mobile development (which was carefully designed based on the results of the first and the second phases), and Phase 4: Proposal of a new methodology for the agile development of mobile applications. With the aim of integrating both perspectives, the survey was answered by a sample of 35 experts, including academics and developers. Interesting results have been collected and discussed in this paper (on issues such as the development process, the tools used during this process, and the general issues and challenges they encountered), laying the foundations of the methodology Agile Beeswax proposed to develop mobile apps. Our results and the proposed methodology are intended to serve as support for mobile application developers. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Software Engineering Development and Applications for Sustainability)
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Review

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28 pages, 4098 KiB  
Review
Bad Smells of Gang of Four Design Patterns: A Decade Systematic Literature Review
by Sara H. S. Almadi, Danial Hooshyar and Rodina Binti Ahmad
Sustainability 2021, 13(18), 10256; https://doi.org/10.3390/su131810256 - 14 Sep 2021
Cited by 6 | Viewed by 4193
Abstract
Gang of Four (GoF) design patterns are widely approved solutions for recurring software design problems, and their benefits to software quality are extensively studied. However, the occurrence of bad smells in design patterns increases the crisis of degenerating design patterns’ structure and behavior. [...] Read more.
Gang of Four (GoF) design patterns are widely approved solutions for recurring software design problems, and their benefits to software quality are extensively studied. However, the occurrence of bad smells in design patterns increases the crisis of degenerating design patterns’ structure and behavior. Their occurrences are detrimental to the benefits of design patterns and they influence software sustainability by increasing maintenance costs and energy consumption. Despite the destructive roles of bad smells in such designs, there are an absence of studies systematically reviewing bad smells of GoF design patterns. This study systematically reviews a 10-year state of the art sample, identifying 16 studies investigating this phenomenon. Following a thorough evaluation of the full contents, we observed that the occurrence of bad smells have been investigated in proportion to four granularity levels of analysis: Design level, category level, pattern level, and role level. We identified 28 bad smells, categorized under code smells and grime symptoms, and emphasized their relationship with GoF pattern types and categories. The utilization of design pattern bad smell detection approaches and datasets were also discussed. Consequently, we observed that the research phenomenon is growing intensively, with a prominent focus of studies analyzing code smell occurrences rather than grime occurrences, at various granularity levels. Finally, we uncovered research gaps and areas with significant potentials for future research. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Software Engineering Development and Applications for Sustainability)
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