Colin C. Venters

University of Leeds

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Requirements articulating the needs of stakeholders are critical to successful system development and key to influencing their long-term effects. As the concept of sustainability has entered the discourse of a number of software-related computing fields, so has the term ‘sustainability requirement’. However, it is unclear whether sustainability req...

Global software stacks on scientific cluster computing resources are required to provide a homogeneous software environment which is typically inflexible. Efforts to integrate Virtual Machines (VMs), in order to abstract the software environment of various scientific applications, suffer from performance limitations and require systems administrati...

Sustainability is now a major concern in society, but there is little understanding of how it is perceived by software engineering professionals and how sustainability design can become an embedded part of software engineering process. This paper presents the results of a qualitative study exploring requirements engineering practitioners' perceptio...

This report records and discusses the Third Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE3). The report includes a description of the keynote presentation of the workshop, which served as an overview of sustainable scientific software. It also summarizes a set of lightning talks in which speakers highlighted to-the-...

This report records and discusses the Third Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE3). The report includes a description of the keynote presentation of the workshop, which served as an overview of sustainable scientific software. It also summarizes a set of lightning talks in which speakers highlighted to-the-...

This technical report records and discusses the Second Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE2). The report includes a description of the alternative, experimental submission and review process, two workshop keynote presentations, a series of lightning talks, a discussion on sustainability, and five discussio...

Significant research has recently been undertaken within the Requirements Engineering (RE) community towards understanding, integrating, and evaluating sustainability concerns in software systems. However, there still is no single point of reference for either RE researchers or practitioners where the work on sustainability is gathered and exemplif...

Linux container technology has more than proved itself useful in cloud computing as a lightweight alternative to virtualisation, whilst still offering good enough resource isolation. Docker is emerging as a popular runtime for managing Linux containers, providing both management tools and a simple file format. Research into the performance of conta...

Sustainability has emerged as a broad concern for society. Many engineering disciplines have been grappling with challenges in how we sustain technical, social and ecological systems. In the software engineering community, for example, maintainability has been a concern for a long time. But too often, these issues are treated in isolation from one...

The rate of scientific discovery depends on the speed at which accurate results and analysis can be obtained. The use of parallel co-processors such as Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) is becoming more and more important in meeting this demand as improvements in serial data processing speed become increasingly difficult to sustain. However, parall...

The idea that there are important parallels between safety and sustainability and that software engineers might be able to take lessons learned from safety and apply them to sustainability has been voiced and initially explored before. This paper extends the analysis of similarities, differences, and potential synergies between the two concepts, ac...

Sustainability, the capacity to endure, is fundamental for the societies on our planet. Despite its increasing recognition in software engineering, it remains difficult to assess the delayed systemic effects of decisions taken in requirements engineering and systems design. To support this difficult task, this paper introduces the concept of sustai...

Principally associated with the field of ecology in order to address humanities increasing ecological footprint on the planet Earth, sustainability as a concept has emerged as an area of interest in the field of computing. While a number of related communities have attempted to understand and address the challenges of sustainability from their diff...

This technical report discusses the submission and peer-review process used by the Second Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE2) and the results of that process. It is intended to record both the alternative submission and program organization model used by WSSSPE2 as well as the papers associated with the...

Introduction As software practitioners and researchers, we are part of the group of people who design the software systems that run our world. Our work has made us increasingly aware of the impact of these systems and the responsibility that comes with our role, at a time when information and communication technologies are shaping the future. We st...

Software sustainability has been identified as one of the key challenges in the development of scientific and engineering software as we move towards new paradigms of research and computing infrastructures. However, it is suggested that sustainability is not well understood within the software engineering community, which can led to ineffective and...

Challenges related to development, deployment, and maintenance of reusable software for science are becoming a growing concern. Many scientists' research increasingly depends on the quality and availability of software upon which their works are built. To highlight some of these issues and share experiences, the First Workshop on Sustainable Softwa...

Challenges related to development, deployment, and maintenance of reusable software for science are becoming a growing concern. Many scientists' research increasingly depends on the quality and availability of software upon which their works are built. To highlight some of these issues and share experiences, the First Workshop on Sustainable Softwa...

The development of sustainable software has been identified as one of the key challenges in the field of computational science and engineering. However, there is currently no agreed definition of the concept. Current definitions range from a composite, non-functional requirement to simply an emergent property. This lack of clarity leads to confusio...

The development of sustainable software has been identified as one of the key challenges in the field of computational science and engineering. However, there is currently no agreed definition of the concept. Current definitions range from a composite, non-functional requirement to simply an emergent property. This lack of clarity leads to confusio...

As modern information systems become increasingly business- and safety-critical, it is extremely important to improve both the trust that a user places in a system and their understanding of the risks associated with making a decision. This paper presents the STRAPP framework, a generic framework that supports both of these goals through the use of...

Large-scale data processing systems frequently require users to make timely and high-value business decisions based upon information that is received from a variety of heterogeneous sources. Such heterogeneity is especially true of service-oriented systems, which are often dynamic in nature and composed of multiple interacting services. However, in...

The move towards network enabled capability (NEC) by the UK Ministry of Defence is designed to achieve enhanced military effect through the networking and coherent integration of existing and future resources including sensors, weapon systems and decision-makers to achieve a more flexible and responsive military. This article addresses the existing...

Modern organizations increasingly depend heavily on information stored and processed in distributed, heterogeneous data sources and services to make critical, high-value decisions. Service-oriented systems are dynamic in nature and are becoming ever more complex systems of systems. In such systems, knowing how data was derived is of significant imp...

Query by visual example is the principal query paradigm for expressing queries in a content-based image retrieval environment. Query by image and query by sketch have long been purported as being viable methods of query formulation yet there is little empirical evidence to support their efficacy in facilitating query formulation. The ability of the...

The ability of the searcher to express their information problem to an information retrieval system is fundamental to the retrieval process. Query by visual example is the principal query paradigm for expressing queries in a content-based image retrieval environment yet there is little empirical evidence to support its efficacy in facilitating quer...

Network Enabled Capability (NEC) is the UK Ministry of Defence’s aspiration to enhance the achievement of military effect through the networking of future and existing military capabilities. The NECTISE (NEC Through Innovative Systems Engineering) program responded to this need by investigating the question ‘are you ready for NEC?’ on behalf of equ...

The move towards Network Enabled Capability (NEC) by the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) is designed to achieve enhanced military effect through the networking and coherent integration of existing and future resources including sensors, weapon systems, and decision makers to achieve greater agility in the prosecution of military operations. One of the...

Scenarios are frequently used within techniques for planning and designing systems. They are an especially helpful means of visualizing and understanding the incorporation of new systems within systems of systems. If used as the basis for decisions about candidate designs, then it is important that such decisions can be rationalized and quantitativ...

Network Enabled Capability (NEC) is the UK Ministry of Defence’s response to the quickly changing conflict environment in which its forces must operate. In NEC, systems need to be integrated in context, to assist in human activity and provide dependable inter-operation. In this paper, we present our research work in the NECTISE project with a focus...

The vision of service-oriented computing is one of loosely coupled services that create agile applications to encapsulate business objectives and processes. The potential of services to form complex systems of systems, with emergent behaviour, necessitates the need to understand how we can we develop sufficient confidence in their qualities. In thi...

Network enabled capability (NEC) is the U.K. Ministry of Defencepsilas response to the quickly changing conflict environment in which its forces must operate. In NEC, systems need to be integrated in context, to assist in human activity and provide dependable inter-operation. In order to provide reliable and sustainable military capability, fast pa...

The Advises (Adaptive Visualization of E-science) project is developing tools to support geographic visualization in epidemiology and public-health decision making. In this project, a user-centered requirements process focuses on the research questions epidemiologists ask, the language they use, and the tacit knowledge employed in reasoning about e...

We describe the experience of using a combination of requirements engineering techniques (scenarios, storyboards, observation and workshops) in an e- science application to develop a geographical analysis tool for epidemiologists. Problems encountered were: eliciting tacit knowledge; and creating new visions and working practices for our users. The...

We describe the requirements analysis method for e-Science which is being developed in the ADVISES project. The procedure and techniques of the method are illustrated by application to two cases studies in epidemiological bio-health informatics. Lessons learned in applying the scenario based analysis method which also embeds Human Computer Interact...

The user interface is the principal component responsible for facilitating human-computer interaction in an information retrieval system and provides the medium between the end user and the system. Query formulation is a core activity in the process of information retrieval and a number of query paradigms have been proposed for specifying a query Q...

Is query by visual example an intuitive method for visual query formulation or merely a prototype framework for visual information retrieval research that cannot support the rich variety of visual search strategies required for effective image retrieval? This paper reports the results of an investigation that aimed to explore the usability of the q...

This chapter demonstrates the range of scientific visualization projects undertaken at Manchester Visualization Center, from archeological to flow-visualization to medical visualization. One of the case studies is a complete turnkey molecular visualization system. The chapter is also intended to demonstrate the flexibility of application visualizat...

This paper reports the results of a usability experiment that investigated visual query formulation on three dimensions: effectiveness, efficiency, and user satisfaction. Twenty eight evaluation sessions were conducted in order to assess the extent to which query by visual example supports visual query formulation in a content-based image retrieval...

Full text of this document is not available in e-space. Abstract copyright SPIE. This paper reports the results of a usability experiment that investigated visual query formulation on three dimensions: effectiveness, efficiency, and user satisfaction. Twenty eight evaluation sessions were conducted in order to assess the extent to which query by vi...

The user interface is the principal component responsible for facilitating human-computer interaction in an information retrieval system and provides the medium between the end user and the system. Query formulation is a core activity in the process of information retrieval and a number of query paradigms have been proposed for specifying a query Q...

This paper reports a study designed to investigate the requirements of a user interface for a content-based image retrieval system, and presents the preliminary results of an inquiry into the usability of the query by visual example paradigm. Twenty eight evaluation sessions were conducted to test the usability of two user interfaces. The study wa...

The LANDMAP Project has created the first IfSAR DEM covering the entire British Isles. That DEM and associated orthorectified ERS images were used to produce a set of orthorectified images of the British Isles from LANDSAT, and SPOT. Additional merged and mosaiced images were also created with the three different satellite products. The dataset com...

User interface design for content-based image retrieval systems is proving to be a fruitful area of research. However, a number of design issues need to be addressed. The major problem lies in the need to provide users with high-quality interfaces for query formulation and display of results. This paper describes the background and intentions of a...

Potential users of e-science software often have strong technical skills, ranging from the use of scripting languages to the development of substantial pieces of software used by other members of their communities. In this paper we reflect on the experience of designing and developing software with a technically expert end user, and consider how th...