Engineering Requirements for Social Sustainability
social sustainability, requirements engineering, value-based design, value patterns
Authors: Maryam Al Hinai, Ruzanna Chitchyan
Year: 2016
Published in: ICT for Sustainability 2016.
Read me: DOI: 10.2991/ict4s-16.2016.10.
Abstract: Software is no longer a passive tool, but is an active agent in shaping modern communities. Yet, to date, software engineers do not endeavour to explicitly state requirements which a software system must fulfil if it is to positively contribute to the well-being (that is the social sustainability) of its user community. This paper presents a proposal on how to bridge this gap. It notes that social sustainability requirements stem from key societal values, such as equity, security, education, which can be elicited into value patterns. Such patterns can then serve as templates for software requirements specification. The viability of this proposal is demonstrated through formation of equity value patterns, which are instantiated as requirements to 6 sample studies. We observe that while each organisation and sub-community will have own diverse cultural and traditional values with respective requirements, the fundamental notions (such as equity, security, freedom) that serve as the core of social sustainability remain relatively stable. It is such values that we propose to elicit into patterns for requirements specification.
Bibtex (copy):@inproceedings{inproceedings,
author = {Al Hinai, Maryam and Chitchyan, Ruzanna},
year = {2016},
month = {01},
pages = {},
title = {Engineering Requirements for Social Sustainability},
doi = {10.2991/ict4s-16.2016.10}
}Annotation
By Robert Arntzenius, Koen Hagen & Floor Straver. 🪧Slides.
Modern communities are actively impacted by software. Since the functionality, constraints and properties of software systems are set through Requirements Engineering, this is the stage though which engineering software sustainably is possible. Social sustainability has, however, not been incorporated yet by requirements engineers into software systems engineering. This is because there are no clear guidelines on what is “positive impact on communities”, how it can be identified, modeled and measured. The paper presents a generic requirements identification methodology, which is based on core societal values, demonstrates an instantiation of this methodology and applies it to six separate studies.
Building a catalog of social sustainability value patterns with respective requirements templates was done in three phases. First they collected core values by literature review, looking at indicators and metrics about social sustainability. Afterwards they extracted value patterns by individually adressing each core value and conducting a qualitative text-analysis of a set of papers that have adressed that core value. Lastly, to define a requirements template, they used a set of questions that help explore as to how a given value can be supported in software requirements.
To validate the claim that the application of value patterns could lead to identification of requirements patterns, the method was applied to a total of six sample requirements specifications. Applying the method shows that similar solutions can be applied to software systems accross a diverse set of domains.
The paper concludes that the evaluation shows that since the proposed approach is suitable for identification of patterns of equality when applied to six different studies, it will likely be equally suitable of other stable values. Lastly it states that the proposed method provides a direction towards the integration of social sustainability concerns into requirements engineering.