Sustainable software engineering - have we neglected the software engineer's perspective?

Abstract

Background: Software development is a knowledge-intensive and creative activity requiring human ingenuity, thus, sustainability from an engineer's perspective (i.e., meeting an engineer's personal and professional needs while maintaining their mental and physical well-being) must be achieved and maintained. Aims: With this paper, we aim to bring attention to the currently overlooked aspect of sustainability from an individual engineer's perspective. Method: Through an analysis of systematic literature reviews and mapping studies, this research demonstrates a lack of research investigating the individual (human) dimension of sustainability in the current software engineering literature. Results: The analysis of the literature reviews reveals that the current research has mainly focused on reducing the energy footprint of software systems. Thus, revealing the renewed need for paying attention to the individual engineer's perspective. Conclusion: Future research should leverage contributions from related research areas like human aspects in software engineering (e.g., topics like cognition and motivation). There is a need for identifying factors that impact sustainability at an individual level and their interplay with the team and organization level practices, policies, and decisions. The overall ambition is to develop empirically validated guidelines and best practices to measure, improve and maintain sustainability from an engineer's perspective. Such measures are expected to ensure engineers' sustainability and enable highquality software development.