Collaborative Research: EAGER: Towards a Design Methodology for Software-Driven Sustainability

Rochester Institute Of Tech, Rochester NY

Investigators

Abstract

With the proliferation of computing technologies in our society, software plays an increasingly prominent role in contributing to and solving sustainability challenges. Despite its importance, however, sustainability remains a poorly understood concept among developers, with a general lack of tools, knowledge, and techniques that can be used to design and validate software systems that account for sustainability. This project aims to elevate sustainability as a first-class quality attribute of software that can be explicitly analyzed and designed for and to empower developers with methods for building sustainability into their systems. In addition, this project contributes novel design strategies and patterns that can influence the behavior of users towards sustainable use of computing products. The outcome of this project lays a foundation for further research in software engineering techniques and methodologies for sustainable computing. To develop an in-depth understanding of sustainability challenges in software engineering, the first step in this project involves an empirical investigation of software applications in emerging, sustainability-relevant domains such as cyber-physical systems, IoT and mobile systems. Next, based on the outcome of this study, the project employs well-established requirements engineering methods to define sustainability as a collection of quality attributes, scenarios, and metrics. Finally, building on this definition, the project develops a catalog of design strategies and patterns that developers can use to build sustainability into their system as an explicit goal. This project also aims to establish a community of researchers in software engineering and other disciplines to encourage increased future activities in sustainability research. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.