Sustainable Software System Engineering

Sustainability management is one of the upcoming movements in the 21st century. Communal and private organizations are interested in finding and using "sustainable" solutions and practices. But, there is a lack of available solutions and practices. In the 21st century also, software systems and their underlying business processes are ubiquitous and fundamental for most of the organizations of the industrial society. But, until now, sustainability is not considered by software system engineering. Hence, to support the transition to sustainability, one must have sustainability (aspects) integrated into the software systems and the underlying business processes. Consequently, in this paper a holistic approach is presented to support the complete life cycle of sustainable software system engineering. To realize such an approach, the sustainable business processes and sustainable software systems need to be aligned through the mapping of sustainability aspects considering their respective life cycles. This is important because software makes an important contribution to sustainable business processes and, the other way round, sustainable software only can be developed and maintained using the relevant business processes. Moreover, to realize sustainability aware software system engineering sustainability aspects must be integrated into the business processes life cycle and software system engineering life cycle. To this end, We suggest a conceptual model to integrate sustainability aspects in a business process modeling language. Also, to assist the stakeholder when modeling, designing, executing, and monitoring the business processes a process model will be presented developed. Furthermore, to integrate sustainability aspects in software engineering, sustainability needs to be considered in the different phases of the software development process: requirements specification, design, testing, and maintenance. Thus, we suggest a method to integrate sustainability in software development. Finally, a model is presented showing the combined life cycles of sustainable business processes and sustainable software engineering.