Who is the advocate? Stakeholders for sustainability

While the research community has started working on sustainable software engineering recently, one question that is often asked still remains unanswered: who are the stakeholders? Who are the people who actually have an interest in improving the sustainability of a specific software system or of the discipline of software engineering itself? And who are the devil's advocates? Having no explicit stakeholders is a problem as improvement of sustainability is challenging without a driving force. An objective that has no stakeholder is not likely to receive sufficient attention to be realized and will eventually disappear. In this paper, we present four approaches of identifying stakeholders for sustainability in a given context: top-down by sustainability dimensions (individual, social, environmental, economic, and technical), by instantiation of a generic list, bottom-up by an organigram, and iteratively by an activity model according to the generic sustainability model. We furthermore analyze the feasibility by a small case study for each approach. As the stakeholders are the key persons determining whether or not any objective is achieved, identifying the stakeholders for sustainability is crucial for successfully implementing sustainability support in a given context.