Characterising Sustainability Requirements: A New Species Red Herring or Just an Odd Fish?

Abstract

Requirements articulating the needs of stakeholdersare critical to successful system development and key to influencingtheir long-term effects. As the concept of sustainabilityhas entered the discourse of a number of software-relatedcomputing fields, so has the term 'sustainability requirement'.However, it is unclear whether sustainability requirements areand should be different from how we already understand softwarerequirements. This paper presents the results of a corpusassisteddiscourse analysis study that explored the concept ofsustainability requirements in order to understand how theterm is being used in software and requirements engineeringand related fields. The results of this study reveal that theterm 'sustainability requirement' is generally used ambiguouslyand reveals significant segmentation across different fields. Ourdetailed analysis of selected influential papers highlights thesegmented use of the term and suggests key focus questionsthat need to be addressed to establish a shared operativeunderstanding of the term.