Leticia Duboc

Leticia Duboc, Curtis McCord, Christoph Becker et al.

The design of software systems inevitably enacts normative boundaries around the site of intervention. These boundaries are, in part, a reflection of the values, ethics, power, and politics of the situation and the process of design itself. This paper argues that Requirements Engineering (RE) require more robust frameworks and techniques to navigate the values implicit in systems design work. To this end, we present the findings from a case of action research where we employed Critical Systems Heuristics (CSH), a framework from Critical Systems Thinking (CST) during requirements gathering for Homesound, a system to safeguard elderly people living alone while protecting their autonomy. We use categories from CSH to inform expert interviews and reflection, showing how CSH can be simply combined with RE techniques (such as the Volere template) to explore and reveal the value-judgements underlying requirements.

Fabian Fagerholm, Christoph Becker, Alexander Chatzigeorgiou et al.

Background: Many decisions made in Software Engineering practices are intertemporal choices: trade-offs in time between closer options with potential short-term benefit and future options with potential long-term benefit. However, how software professionals make intertemporal decisions is not well understood. Aim: This paper investigates how shifting time frames influence preferences in software projects in relation to purposefully selected background factors. Method: We investigate temporal discounting by replicating a questionnaire-based observational study. The replication uses a changed-population and -experimenter design to increase the internal and external validity of the original results. Results: The results of this study confirm the occurrence of temporal discounting in samples of both professional and student participants from different countries and demonstrate strong variance in discounting between study participants. We found that professional experience influenced discounting. Participants with broader professional experience exhibited less discounting than those with narrower experience. Conclusions: The results provide strong empirical support for the relevance and importance of temporal discounting in SE and the urgency of targeted interdisciplinary research to explore the underlying mechanisms and their theoretical and practical implications. The results suggest that technical debt management could be improved by increasing the breadth of experience available for critical decisions with long-term impact. In addition, the present study provides a methodological basis for replicating temporal discounting studies in software engineering.

Leticia Duboc, Faisal Alrebeish, Vivek Nallur et al.

This paper shows that authors have no consistent way to characterize the scalability of their solutions, and so consider only a limited number of scaling characteristics. This review aimed at establishing the evidence that the route for designing and evaluating the scalability of dynamic QoS-aware service composition mechanisms has been lacking systematic guidance, and has been informed by a very limited set of criteria. For such, we analyzed 47 papers, from 2004 to 2018.

Birgit Penzenstadler, Stefanie Betz, Colin C. Venters et al.

We report on a summer school course on Software Engineering for Sustainability (SE4S). We provide a detailed blueprint of the contents taught and its evaluation with the instruments that were used.

Christoph Becker, Ruzanna Chitchyan, Leticia Duboc et al.

Sustainability is a central concern for our society, and software systems increasingly play a central role in it. As designers of software technology, we cause change and are responsible for the effects of our design choices. We recognize that there is a rapidly increasing awareness of the fundamental need and desire for a more sustainable world, and there is a lot of genuine goodwill. However, this alone will be ineffective unless we come to understand and address our persistent misperceptions. The Karlskrona Manifesto for Sustainability Design aims to initiate a much needed conversation in and beyond the software community by highlighting such perceptions and proposing a set of fundamental principles for sustainability design.