Application of the Sustainability Awareness Framework in Agile Software Development

Sustainability has become a widely discussed topic in software and requirements engineering. However, in the context of agile software development processes, little is known about how to identify potential sustainability effects of software systems. The goal of our research is to investigate how requirements engineering knowledge on sustainability can be incorporated into agile frameworks like Scrum. In this experience paper, we present the results of two case studies from ongoing agile development projects where the Sustainability Awareness Framework was applied. Within workshops, more than 20 potential sustainability effects have been identified for each of the systems based on their product visions. Furthermore, we analyzed the product backlogs and found that more than half of the backlog items of both systems can be related to at least one of the identified sustainability effects. This suggests that a sustainability analysis of backlog items can support the early identification of potential sustainability effects in Scrum. Our findings suggest that the Sustainability Awareness Framework can be successfully used by practitioners in agile settings based on the guidelines provided by the Sustainability Awareness Framework.