The topic of software sustainability has established itself as an area of interest in the software engineering community, given modern society’s high dependency on increasingly complex and ‘dangerously fragile’ software systems, which operate in continuously evolving and increasingly distributed eco-systems. Software sustainability is generally understood as the capacity of a socio-technical system to endure. However, this merely raises further questions. Sustain what? For whom? How long? At what cost?. Alternative views consider sustainable software as being explicitly designed for continuous maintainability and evolvability without incurring prohibitive technical debt and a negative impact on the dimensions of sustainability. However, other views argue that sustainability cannot be measured in advance as a property based on the future.

This working session will engage the community in discussing the notion of sustainability in software engineering and the progress in research and practice to address the sustainability of software. We will discuss whether we can measure the sustainability of software? If not, why? If so, how? What current metrics and measurements can be utilised, if any, to measure software’s sustainability? Where are the gaps, and what are the open research challenges?

We will capture a snapshot of the current state of knowledge and challenges associated with software sustainability and jointly brainstorm on potential approaches, research gaps, and opportunities to address these challenges using Mentimeter (menti.com) and a Miro board (miro.com). Be ready! Finally, we aim to publish the session results to serve as an input for industry and academia to work together on research opportunities to solve these open issues, barriers, and challenges.

Dr Colin C. Venters is a Reader (Associate Professor) in Software Engineering at the University of Huddersfield. His primary research interest is in architectural-level reasoning for pre-system understanding, and post-system maintenance and evolution in the design of sustainable software systems. He is a founding member of the Sustainability Design Alliance (www.sustainabilitydesign.org) and co-author of the Karlskrona Manifesto for Sustainability Design (https://www.sustainabilitydesign.org/karlskrona-manifesto/).