Discovering Sustainability Requirements: an Experience Report

Sustainability has become one of the “grand challenges” of our civilization. Because of their pervasiveness, the way we design, and consequently use, software-intensive systems has a significant impact on sustainability. This gives software requirements engineering an important role to play in society. However, there is currently no specific support for handling sustainability requirements, while such support exists and has proved useful for other quality requirements like security or usability. This paper reports on a software project in which sustainability requirements were treated as first class quality requirements, and as such systematically elicited, analysed and documented. The authors intended to assess how current techniques support these activities. Beyond raising awareness on the importance of sustainability concerns in requirements engineering, this experience report suggests that, while a lot of work remains to be done, small and easy steps may already lead us to more sustainable systems. It also contributes to the agenda of requirements engineering researchers concerned with sustainability.