Background/Context : The ob jective of achieving higher sustainability in our lifestyles by information and communication technology has lead to a plethora of research activities in related fields. Consequently, Software Engineering for Sustainability (SE4S) has developed as an active area of research. Objective/Aim: Although SE4S has gained much attention over the past few years and has resulted in a number of contributions, there is only one rigorous survey of the field. We would like to follow up on this systematic mapping study from 2012 with a more in-depth overview of the status of research, as most of the work has been conducted in the last 4 years. Method: The applied method is a systematic mapping study through which we investigate which contributions were made over time, which software engineering knowledge areas are most explored, and which research type facets have been used, to distill a common understanding of the state-of-the-art in SE4S. Results: We contribute an overview of current research topics and trends, and their distribution according to the research type facet and the application domains. Furthermore, we aggregate the topics into clusters and list proposed and used methods, frameworks, and tools. Conclusion: The research map shows that impact currently is limited to few knowledge areas and there is need for a future roadmap to fill the gaps.

1. xkcd: Cold.
http://xkcd.com/1321/

2. Systematic Mapping Study on
Software Engineering for Sustainability (SE4S)
Birgit Penzenstadler,
Ankita Raturi,
Debra Richardson
University of California, Irvine, USA
Xavier Franch
Universitat Politècnica
de Catalunya, Spain
Henning Femmer
Technische Universität München,
Germany
Coral Calero
Universidad de Castilla - La
Mancha, Spain

3. Software Engineering for Sustainability (SE4S)
Sustainability:
capacity to endure
• Green in IT:
energy & efficiency
• Green by IT:
system purpose
Both need support by software
engineering
Research Objective:
What is the current state of the
art and practice in SE4S?
xkcd: Cold. http://xkcd.com/1321/

5. Systematic Mapping Study on SE4S
• RQ1 What research topics are being addressed?
• RQ2 How have these evolved over time?
• RQ3 How is sustainability support performed (e.g.,
models and methods)?
• RQ4 Which are used in practice?
• RQ5 Which research type facets?
• RQ6 Which application domains?
• RQ7 Which research groups?

6. Approach
1. Develop protocol
2. Define search string
3. Define classification scheme
4. Define data extraction form
5. Internal review of protocol
6. External review of protocol
7. Revise protocol
8. Identify primary research
9. Retrieve primary research
10. Clean from duplicates
11. Vote on search results
12. Assessment of voting
13. Data extraction
14. Data synthesis
15. Internal analysis validation
16. External analysis validation
17. Complete technical report
18. Write summary paper
19. Review of report & paper
Design
Execution
Documentation
Quality Assurance:
• Reviews
• Voting
• Validation

7. Topic&2&
Topic&7&Topic&4&
Topic&5&
Topic&6&
Topic&8&
Topic&9&
Topic&10&
Topic&1&
Topic&3&
RQ1: What research topics are being addressed?
Tool: MALLET
http://mallet.cs.umass.edu

8. RQ2: How have these research topics evolved over time?
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1 1 1 1 1 1
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21:62

9. RQ3: How is sustainability support performed (e.g., models
and methods)?
Masses of models…
Geo Sciences:
 Global position system, internet map services
Earth Sciences:
 Environmental information systems
Energy Management:
 Measuring devices, traffic management systems
…and Methods
Software engineering methods & tools:
 Goal modeling, stakeholder modeling, agent
modeling, service modeling, process modeling,
simulation
Systems Engineering:
 Life cycle assessment
Urban Planning:
 Simulation
General purpose methods & tools:
 Interviews, statistics, surveys

10. [R. Wieringa, N. Maiden, N. Mead, and C. Rolland, “Requirements engineering paper classification and evaluation criteria: a proposal
and a discussion,” Requir. Eng., vol. 11, pp. 102–107, Dec. 2005.]
RQ5: Which research type facets have been considered in
the contributions?
RQ4: Which of those models and methods are used in
practice?

11. RQ7: Which research groups are most active?
http://www-958.ibm.com/software/analytics/manyeyes/

12. Conclusion
State of the research:
• Strong momentum in the community
• Variety of methods applied on various models
• Very few reports on application in practice
There is need for a future roadmap.

13. Thanks to
anonymous reviewers and
research protocol reviewers:
Daniel Méndez Fernández
Marcela Genero
Interested in the topic?
Submit to our workshop
RE4SuSy’14 by June 2nd
to join the discussion:
http://www.ics.uci.edu/
~bpenzens/2014re4susy/