Birgit Penzenstadler

Chalmers University of Technology · Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Context: Individual sustainability is undermined by continuous stress, a circumstance many software developers and computer workers are constantly exposed to via deadlines, over-commitment, and high workload. Purpose: We analyze the experience of IT workers when using a deep breathing practice to improve wellbeing, considering their perception of i...

📢 Call for Submissions! We are inviting submissions for IEEE Software's special issue on 'Wellbeing for Resilience: Developers Thrive'. This is an opportunity to explore the critical interplay of wellbeing, resilience, and the work environment of software engineers. We're interested in a wide range of topics, including but not limited to: 💻 Ment...

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) identify key topics where action is required to transform our world towards sustainability. We call for the extensive integration of the SDGs into Software Engineering to support this transformation. This will require the creation of methods and tools for the analysis of software system impact...

This edition of the “Practitioner’s Digest” features recent papers on open source software related to toxicity in open source discussions, newcomers in open source projects, quality of ansible scripts, code review practices, orphan vulnerabilities in open source software, and the relationship between community and design smells.

Research shows that the global society as organized today, with our current technological and economic system, is impossible to sustain. We are living in the Anthropocene, an era in which human activities in highly industrialized countries are responsible for overshooting several planetary boundaries, with poorer communities contributing least to t...

This edition of the “Practitioner’s Digest” features recent papers on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), along with papers on tech debt, energy consumption, and collaboration between industry and academia.

Achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) demands adequate levels of awareness and actions to address sustainability challenges. Software systems will play an important role in moving towards these targets. Sustainability skills are necessary to support the development of software systems and to provide sustainable IT-supported services...

Why AI does not include gender in its agenda? The role of gender in AI, both as part of the community of agents creating such technologies, as well as part of the contents processed by such technologies is, by far, conflictive. Women have been, again, obliterated by this fundamental revolution of our century. Highly innovative and the first step in...

This edition of the “Practitioners’ Digest” covers an eclectic mix of topics from cannabis usage to world politics to large language models.

Motivation & challenge: Computer Science suffers from a lack of diversity that gets perpetuated by the most dominant and visible role models. The community is doing itself a disservice by upholding techno-solutionism, short-term efficiency, and busyness as central values. Those models are created and consolidated over time through social and cultur...

Innovations and efficiencies in digital technology have lately been depicted as paramount in the green transition to enable the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, both in the information and communication technology (ICT) sector and the wider economy. This, however, fails to adequately account for rebound effects that can offset emission saving...

This edition of the “Practitioner’s Digest” summarizes five recently published conference and journal pages on the topic of infrastructure-as-code.

In honor of this issue’s theme of “Artificial Intelligence (AI) Engineering—Realizing the Potential of AI,” this edition of the “Practitioners’ Digest” brings you recent papers on AI and machine learning (ML) engineering, which we believe will be of interest to practitioners. These papers were published in the First International Conference on AI E...

The theme of this issue is “Bots in Software Engineering,” and we’ve collected a number of recent papers about bots that interact with source code repositories. These papers were published at the fourth International Workshop on Bots in Software Engineering (BotSE ’22), the 37th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC ’22), the International...

Context Computer workers in general, and software developers specifically, are under a high amount of stress due to continuous deadlines and, often, over-commitment. Objective This study investigates the effects of a neuroplasticity practice, a specific breathing practice, on the attention awareness, well-being, perceived productivity, and self-ef...

In keeping with the issue theme of multiconcern assurance, this month’s column features summaries of related papers published recently in the 2021 International Conference on Computer Safety, Reliability, and Security (SAFECOMP 2021), the 26th European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs (EuroPLoP’21), and the 2021 International Conference...

Companies are required to think of ways to address their sustainability responsibilities and impacts. Although they commonly present some of their activities and impacts at a high-level of abstraction in their sustainability strategies, the impacts of their products and services may remain unclear in such reporting. This is partly due to the lack o...

Companies are required to think of ways to address their sustainability responsibilities and impacts. Although they commonly present some of their activities and impacts at a high-level of abstraction in their sustainability strategies, the impacts of their products and services may remain unclear in such reporting. This is partly due to the lack o...

Context. Computer workers in general, and software developers specifically, are under a high amount of stress due to continuous deadlines and, often, over-commitment. Objective. This study investigates the effects of a neuroplasticity practice, a specific breathing practice, on the attention awareness, well-being, perceived productivity, and self-e...

Presents papers from the 2020 IEEE Conference on Requirements Engineering and the ACM/ IEEE 23rd International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS 2020).

Busyness and lack of sleep seem to be a badge of honour in a large part of our society, yet they don’t lead to long-lasting satisfaction with achievements or even to a sustainable pace of life but instead to burnout or at least creeping exhaustion and loss of quality of life. This is true for software engineers as much as for many other professions...

The “Practioners' Digest” department in this issue of IEEE Software covers two topics: the behavioral science of software engineering and diversity in software engineering (this issue’s theme) and includes papers from the 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE20), 2019 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and E...

Sustainability and sustainable development are emerging trends all over the world. The need for changes is evident and immediate. To tackle all the technical and social sustainability challenges, people need to be educated. To date, computer science and software engineering education has not fully answered to this need. This chapter presents a sust...

From Sept to Dec 2020 we ran a study on the benefits of breathwork. 33 participants completed the 12-week study.

Presents summaries of articles included in this issue of the publication.

Integrating novel software systems in our society, economy and environment can have far-reaching effects. As a result, software systems should be designed in such a way as to maintain or improve the sustainability of their intended socio-technical systems. However, a paradigm shift is required to raise awareness of software professionals on the pot...

This issue's practitioners' Digest reports on papers from the 2018 International Conference on Mining Sof tware Repositories, the 2019 International Conference on Requirements Engineering, and the 2019 European Conference on Software Process Improvement. Feedback or suggestions are welcome. In addition, if you try or adopt any of the practices incl...

The software development process is a complex human, intellectual and labor-intensive activity and human related factors have shown to be the most significant contributors to software system failures. Lacking the ability to identify or quantify these factors, software practitioners will not learn from the failures caused by them. Although, social f...

Context: Software engineers are plagued by the same troubles as many others in highly skilled jobs and digitized environments: Ever-expanding to-do lists, time to market pressure from management, deadline-driven development, continuous interruption during working tasks, and the juggle of balancing that with other areas of life (physical, mental and...

Presents information on the 2019 International Conference on Requirements Engineering.

As I'm sitting in the audience of a software development day, where Johan Sanneblad (hiQ developer and business consultant) raves about the possibilities of ultrawideband ( IEEE Standard for Information Technology , IEEE Standard 802.15.4a, 2007) and wireless personal area networks and the new chip that Apple put in their new iPhone, I realize that...

Sustainability—the capacity to endure—has emerged as a concern of central relevance for society. However, the nature of sustainability is distinct from other concerns addressed by computing research, such as automation, self-adaptation, or intelligent systems. It demands the consideration of environmental resources, economic prosperity, individual...

Smart Cyber-Physical Systems (sCPS) are a novel kind of Cyber- Physical System engineered to take advantage of large-scale cooperation between devices, users and environment to achieve added value in the face of uncertainty and changing environments. Examples of sCPS include modern traffic systems, Industry 4.0 systems, systems for smart buildings,...

Information system designers embed values into the systems they design, even if unwittingly. However, the values embedded in many information systems clash with values held by many sustainability communities. This research focuses on two grassroots sustainable agriculture communities, which are seeking to develop a food infrastructure that is under...

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 shifti...

Sustainability and Green ICT are concepts that are usually not engineered into the design and development of ICT systems especially in the developing countries. This paper focuses on an interactive system, the Automated Teller Machine (ATM) in Nigeria. Current research concerning ATMs does not consider sustainability and green requirements in the d...

Sustainability in software design is an evolving area that requires more practical guidance on how software engineers and businesses could innovate and design software systems that consider sustainability as a guiding principle for supporting a sustainable environment, reducing the negative impact of ICT and at the same time promoting software syst...

Sustainable polyculture gardens thrive more effectively when they are designed with an awareness of other gardens in the community, as opposed to as individual gardens. However, the complex characteristics of plants, and their relations to other plant species in terms of needs and capacities, require a complex knowledge base not easily acquired by...

This issue's Practioners' Digest column reports on the 2018 Measurement and Metrics for Green and Sustainable Software Systems Workshop (MeGSuS), the ACM/IEEE 21st International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS), and the 12th European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA).

Context: Requirements Engineering (RE) has established itself as a software engineering discipline over the past decades. While researchers have been investigating the RE discipline with a plethora of empirical studies, attempts to systematically derive an empirical theory in context of the RE discipline have just recently been started. However, su...

Commercially off-the-shelf (COTS) quantified self-wearable technologies (QSWT) have enabled younger individuals to adopt a measurable living style [49] through the collection of “quantifiable data”. However, the adoption of wearables remains lowest among the older adult, and the question of what is holding adoption back remains. The purpose of this...

Since the 1950s, artificial intelligence (AI) has been a recurring topic in research. However, this field has only recently gained significant momentum because of the advances in technology and algorithms, along with new AI techniques such as machine learning methods for structured data, modern deep learning, and natural language processing for uns...

This issue’s article reports from the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 18) and the 17th International Conference on Software Reuse (ICSR 18). The ICSE papers focus on sociotechnical issues related to gender and sentiment or emotion. The ICSR paper focuses on safety-critical systems.

Energy efficiency is one of the very few measures widely used for evaluating green and sustainable software systems. This paper investigates the current measures of software sustainability from the four different software sustainability perceptions: Sustainability in Software Development, Green Software Systems, Software for Sustainability, Sustain...

The future of computing research relies on addressing an array of limitations on a planetary scale.

In this perspective paper, we investigate the parallels between public policy and IT projects from the perspective of traditional RE practice. Using the mainstream media as an information source (as would an average citizen), over a period of approximately one year we captured documents that presented analyses of public policy issues. The documents...

Continuous requirements elicitation is an essential aspect of software product evolution to keep systems aligned with changing user needs. However, current requirements engineering approaches do not explicitly address sustainability in the evolution of systems. Reasons include a lack of awareness and a lack of shared understanding of the concept of...

In order to show their compliance with Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) goals, companies report their “sustainable initiatives” into their CSR reports. However, from small companies to multinational, it is hard to see the real benefits of sustainable strategies’ implementation, since there are actually no general patterns defined which can ens...

Requirements Engineering (RE) plays a critical role in software system development and is argued to be the key leverage point for practitioners who want to design sustainable software-intensive systems. However, existing RE methods and tools do not explicitly facilitate the discussion and negotiation of sustainability-related concerns. This leads t...

In an effort to become more resilient and contribute to saving water and other resources, people become more interested in growing their own food, but do not have sufficient gardening experience and education on conserving water. Previous work has attempted to develop resilient smart gardens that support the user in automated watering using simple...

Like other communities, sustainability in and for software design is a grand research and development challenge. Current research focuses on eliciting the meanings of sustainability and on building approaches for its engineering and integration into the mainstream software development lifecycle. However, few concrete guidelines that software design...

This issue’s article reports on papers from the IEEE 25th International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering (SANER 18) and 5th International Conference on Information and Communications Technology for Sustainability (ICT4S 18).

In recent years various usability issues related to device characteristics of quantified-self wearables such as smartwatches and pedometers have been identified which appear likely to impact device adoption among the older adults. However, an overall framework has not yet been developed to provide a comprehensive set of usability issues related to...

Like other ICT communities, sustainability in software engineering is a major research and development concerns. Current research focusses on eliciting the meanings of sustainability and proposing approaches for its engineering and integration into the mainstream software development lifecycle. However, few concrete guidelines that software designe...

Sustainability has become an important concern across many disciplines, and software systems play an increasingly central role in addressing it. However, teaching students from software engineering and related disciplines to effectively act in this space requires interdisciplinary courses that combines the concept of sustainability with software en...

Today's industries in various domains are becoming more and more driven by software as innovator. They range from web applications powering our increasingly digitalized daily lives to deeply embedded systems driving complex and safety-critical cyber-physical systems (CPS) as in, for example, self-driving vehicles. Companies need to continuously rej...

Requirements Engineering (RE) has established itself as a software engineering discipline during the past decades. While researchers have been investigating the RE discipline with a plethora of empirical studies, attempts to systematically derive an empirically-based theory in context of the RE discipline have just recently been started. However, s...

Our climate is changing rapidly, and the effects of that have shown themselves through the droughts in California. In an effort to be- come more resilient and contribute to saving water and other re- sources, people become more interested in growing their own food, but do not have sufficient gardening experience and education on conserving water. P...

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.

We as software engineers are responsible for the long-term consequences of the systems we design - including impacts on the wider environmental and societal sustainability. However, field lacks analytical tools for understanding these potential impacts while designing a system, nor for identifying opportunities for how to use software to bring abou...

Context Modern societies are highly dependent on complex, large-scale, software-intensive systems that increasingly operate within an environment of continuous availability, which is challenging to maintain and evolve in response to the inevitable changes in stakeholder goals and requirements of the system. Software architectures are the foundation...