Sustainability requirement patterns

In light of the looming threats of global climate change and environmental degradation, the software research community has begun to recognize the need to transition toward environmental sustainability. However, the process of detecting, specifying and evaluating requirements related to environmental sustainability within industry is often neglected or at best performed after the system is built. Most software engineering teams do not include any environmental sustainability expertise to account for the broad range of sustainability concerns related to software systems. To overcome the barriers of incorporating environmental sustainability into the requirements engineering process, this paper suggests the use of sustainability requirement patterns (SRPs), which will provide software engineers with guidance on how to write specific types of sustainability requirements. SRPs contain information on the situations in which the pattern should be used, a starting point for developing sustainability requirements, and any other information needed to develop requirements of a specific type. This research is part of an overarching research project on Software Engineering for Sustainability.