Requirements engineers have a responsibility for the long-term consequences of the systems they put in place. Socio-technical systems bring many benefits and positive impacts to humankind, but also a number of inherent risks and potential negative impacts. We explore a range of such impacts across all dimensions of sustainability and how they can be discovered systematically. We show how positive impacts can be supported and reinforced, and how negative impacts can be anticipated and mitigated.

Let’s choose the responsibility that comes with developing software systems not as a burden but as a privileged chance to shift and transform our impacts on the world. That includes taking care of individual sustainability from the perspective of the individual developer as well as the user groups and other stakeholders of the system to be.

Birgit Penzenstadler is faculty at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, and Lappeenranta Lahti University of Technology, Finland (before: California State University Long Beach). Her research focus is how neuroplasticity practices can support engineers and other computer workers in improving their presence, creativity, cognitive abilities, immune systems, sleep and overall resilience (for details, see https://www.twinkleflip.com). She has been researching the relation between sustainability and software engineering for a decade and focuses on artifact-based requirements engineering and requirements engineering for sustainability. Her expertise includes requirements elicitation, analysis, design and documentation techniques, for example sustainability goal modeling, as well as artifact models, quality modeling, tool support, and process improvement (see https://www.sustainabilitydesign.org and http://birgit.penzenstadler.de). Penzenstadler received a habilitation from the Technical University of Munich’s Faculty of Informatics. She’s a member of IEEE and ACM. Contact her at birgitp @ chalmers.se