Sustainability-Driven Meetings as a Way to Incorporate Sustainability

into Software Development Phases

Ana Carolina Moises de Souza

, Daniela Cruzes

and Letizia Jaccheri

Department of Computer Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Høgskoleringen 1, Trondheim, Norway

Keywords:

Software Sustainability, Social Sustainability, Sustainable Software Engineering, Agile Software

Development.

Abstract:

Software sustainability has been a trending topic in the last decade in academia. Studies related to software

sustainability propose models, frameworks, or practices that can be applied in the industry. But most of these

proposals are still not systematically adopted in the industry. Therefore, there is an opportunity to create

a structured meeting to support the concrete adoption of sustainability practices in software development.

This paper aims to provide an overview of these frameworks and how they can help facilitate sustainability-

driven meetings (SusDM). Seeking this, we present practical examples and a workﬂow to prepare the meeting

by applying the existing sustainability frameworks in SusDM. As a position paper, our hypothesis is that the

contributions of this meeting may be related to improving the knowledge of software developers on sustainable

software engineering, discovering new sustainability requirements, prioritization, and implementing software

sustainability practices.

1 INTRODUCTION

Nowadays, Sustainability in Software Engineering is

a trending research topic, and it is contextualized from

software process, and software product perspectives

(Calero et al., 2022). From the software product

perspective (Penzenstadler et al., 2014a), proposed a

framework to analyze the software product effects in

each sustainability dimension. (Hilty and Aebischer,

2015), argued about the life cycle impact of an Infor-

mation Technology and Communication (ICT) prod-

uct, which can be reduced by improving its processes

on environmental and social dimensions. Regarding

sustainability as part of the software development pro-

cess, (Lago et al., 2015) proposes that sustainability

can be framed into software quality requirements, just

as Security and Usability disciplines.

One recurrent problem in today’s software devel-

opment projects is the deprioritization of nonfunc-

tional aspects (Tøndel et al., 2019). There is still a

lack of systematic ways to deal with aspects of the

software that encompass more than just one function-

ality. For example, in Security (Tøndel et al., 2019):

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8620-6330

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2490-902X

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5547-2270

a) security is often seen as not part of strategic deci-

sions, b) security aspects have a tendency to be sacri-

ﬁced in favor of implementing more functionality and

c) responsibility for software security is often unclear.

This previous work proposed such meetings for secu-

rity as a way to increase and systematize the prioriti-

zation of security activities in software development

projects (Tøndel et al., 2019) (Tøndel and Cruzes,

2022). Our hypothesis is that Software Sustainabil-

ity suffers from the same challenges as security. The

relationship between these areas is described by (Pen-

zenstadler et al., 2014b) where sustainability is also

seen as a non-functional requirement.

One evidence of these challenges was studied by

(de Souza et al., 2022) that has performed a multi-case

study aiming to understand how sustainability prac-

tices were addressed in the software development area

of ﬁnancial institutions. The results from the inter-

views have identiﬁed that some organizations do not

apply sustainability in software development in a sys-

tematized way. Thus, organizational practices related

to social, environmental, technical, and economic di-

mensions are found outside of the software develop-

ment scope and mainly at the organizational level.

(Calero et al., 2019) conﬁrms through the analysis of

ten Corporate Social Responsibility reports that there

are more actions related to other areas than to soft-

Moises de Souza, A., Cruzes, D. and Jaccheri, L.

Sustainability-Driven Meetings as a Way to Incorporate Sustainability into Software Development Phases.

DOI: 10.5220/0011984700003464

In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering (ENASE 2023), pages 597-604

ISBN: 978-989-758-647-7; ISSN: 2184-4895

 2023 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. Under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

597

ware sustainability adoption in information technol-

ogy companies.

Aiming to improve the software sustainability

knowledge, organizational strategic view towards

software sustainability, and well-deﬁned roles and

processes, we propose Sustainability-driven Meetings

(SusDM). SusDM is organized into two main parts:

preparation for the meeting and facilitation of the

meeting. For the preparation part, we suggest a work-

ﬂow that will allow practitioners to identify the busi-

ness context, the end user, the internal and external

stakeholders, the Software Development Life Cycle

(SDLC) phase, and ﬁnally the steps to run the SusDM

based on the output of the previous stages. The sec-

ond part uses the existing sustainability frameworks,

which will be discussed in Section 4, to facilitate the

meetings. At the end of the SusDM, it is expected

to have a list of practices, features, and process that

reﬂects sustainability concerns to be mitigated by the

software under construction.

As a position paper, we are planning to conduct

a focus group as an observatory study to understand

people’s reactions and perceptions during the meet-

ing (Stewart et al., 2007). Action research will com-

plement the focus group in terms of understanding

the current scenario of software sustainability in the

context of agile software development (Davison et al.,

2004). The meeting will be evaluated and improved

by collecting feedback from participants and follow-

ing up on actions taken after each SusDM session.

The paper structure is as follows. In section 2,

we provide the research background. Section 3 con-

tains an explanation of Sustainability-driven meet-

ings. Section 4 includes a discussion about software

sustainability frameworks and the possibilities of ap-

plying this meeting. Then, in section 5, we conclude

and propose future research work.

2 BACKGROUND AND RELATED

WORK

Trends in the Green and Sustainable Software re-

search ﬁeld indicate a growth in publications pro-

duced each year in this area (Calero et al., 2020).

The contribution of this review reinforces the impor-

tance about sustainability research and shows the op-

portunities to make it valuable for the software de-

velopment community and society. The contribu-

tions of existing frameworks are promising to start

the conversation and awareness about sustainabil-

ity in software (Messnarz et al., 2014), (Hinai and

Chitchyan, 2016), (Ahmad et al., 2016), (Kopec et al.,

2018), (Lago, 2019), (Duboc et al., 2020), (Condori-

Fernandez et al., 2020), (Albuquerque et al., 2021).

In the review conducted by (Calero et al., 2020), the

studies were classiﬁed into knowledge areas of Soft-

ware Engineering. The results show that Software

Process demands research related to sustainability,

and the most signiﬁcant research contributions were

in Software Quality studies.

In Software Sustainability, it is necessary to have

activities linked to the software development lifecy-

cle (SDLC). In agile software development, meet-

ings are vital to executing the agile software devel-

opment process. For example, SCRUM is supported

by regular events, that are goal-driven meetings such

as sprint planning, sprint review, sprint retrospectives,

and daily scrum, where each meeting has its purpose

(Schwaber and Sutherland, 2020). These meetings

have very well-deﬁned goals, and they are structured

in terms of the role designated to run it, the timebox

of the meeting, the preparation before the meeting,

the selection of the right people involved, the deﬁ-

nition of a goal, the follow-up actions after the meet-

ings and its assessment and reﬂection to improve them

(Andriyani et al., 2017). Scaled agile methods such

as Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), propose system-

atic meetings or events to run the method and ensure

the process runs smoothly (SAFe, 2021a). The dif-

ference between not scaled and scaled methods is the

complexity, the number of people involved, the co-

ordination of distributed teams, and the strategies re-

quired to keep good enough communication between

organizational areas, people, and customers (Uludag

et al., 2021) (Dingsøyr et al., 2017) (Alzoubi and Gill,

2014). Kanban is another agile method, in which the

purpose is a continuous ﬂow managed by lead times

and delivery of value between upstream and down-

stream areas. Feedback loops are necessary to im-

prove the ﬂow in all areas, therefore ”Kanban deﬁnes

seven speciﬁc feedback opportunities or cadences.

Cadences are the cyclical meetings and reviews that

drive evolutionary change, and effective service de-

livery” (Anderson, 2010). On the current approaches

for agile methods, there are no meetings with the goal

of addressing software sustainability.

In the available literature about Sustainability

in Software engineering and Green and Sustainable

Software, we did not ﬁnd related work to what we

suggest in this paper - sustainability-driven meetings

(SusDM). In most of the agile software development

methods mentioned (Scrum, Kanban, and SAFe), the

terms ”sustainability” and ”sustainable” are used to

sustain or enhance something without wasting re-

sources. For example, SAFe addresses Sustainabil-

ity to deliver sustainable solutions to the customer

and sustainable business agility (SAFe, 2023). In

ENASE 2023 - 18th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering

598

their view, to reach Sustainability, the teams must be

able to release on demand. Thus, Sustainability re-

quires continuous delivery from the software archi-

tect’s perspective (SAFe, 2021b). On the other hand,

Kanban and Scrum are concerned with the team’s

Sustainability in terms of sustainable pace and fair

workload (Yeret, 2021). When dealing with software

engineering, Sustainability is seen as a quality re-

quirement that requires valuable systematic practices

to implement and evaluate sustainability in software

(Condori-Fernandez and Lago, 2019).

3 SUSTAINABILITY-DRIVEN

MEETINGS

Sustainability-driven meetings aim to introduce the

topic to be discussed systematically and reﬂect in

each phase of software development. Figure 1 shows

an example of the possible workﬂow of how the

SusDM can be initiated in the software development

context.

As mentioned before, the Sustainability-driven

meeting was inspired by (Tøndel et al., 2019) (Tøndel

and Cruzes, 2022). The authors proposed regular

security meetings in three different companies con-

ducted through action research and case study. The

goals were to make security visible and tangible,

reach key stakeholders, and ensure ongoing security

prioritization. Along with these goals, a set of rec-

ommended strategies were combined based on the

software security literature. In this context, it was

possible to identify what inﬂuences the adoption of

security meetings regarding driving force, visibility,

motivation, room to manoeuvre and process match.

An example of the positive effects of this meeting

is ”As meeting participants gained more competence

and conﬁdence on security, they improved their abil-

ity to act as a driving force for security.” Moreover,

this study has shown that speciﬁc security meeting

has increased the security tasks because the team had

dedicated time to discuss them, without impact to the

project delivery date. The main difference between

the Security Intention meeting (Tøndel and Cruzes,

2022) and the SusDM is about the preparation work-

ﬂow required before SusDM starts (Figure 1). This

is because software sustainability is still an emerg-

ing topic in the industry and therefore requires guided

instruction on how to adopt it in the SDLC (Calero

et al., 2019).

It is essential to be prepared before the meeting

starts, which will take some time in the ﬁrst place.

However, the following meetings will probably not

require much effort in preparation.

The workﬂow starts on the 01-Discovering stage,

which is divided into two steps. The ﬁrst step in this

stage is Business Domain, which aims to identify the

business context. This context is usually the purpose

of the software. For example, if the software is devel-

oped to manage blood donations, the business context

might be Health. The discovery of business context to

address sustainability concerns allows us to reﬁne bet-

ter and create features that will positively impact so-

ciety. Thus, sustainability is very context-dependent

(Miller, 2012). The second step of 01-Dicovering

stage is to identify who will beneﬁt from the soft-

ware and to whom the software is intended to be used,

which means the end-user of the software. In this

case, the software development area could use tech-

niques from the user experience ﬁeld to help with this

discovery. We selected some examples of user expe-

riences techniques listed in Figure 1: Personal Maps

(Team, 2022), Ecosystem Map (UX-republic, 2022),

Empathy Map (Brown, 2018), and User Journey Map

(Bradley et al., 2021). We argue that user-centered

designing contributes to social sustainability and the

transfer ability to human values once the designers’

and researchers’ responsibility is ”to think more con-

siderately and diversely toward individuals’ varied”

(Bradley et al., 2021).

The next stage is 02-Stakeholders Map which

is divided into two steps. The ﬁrst one is the Inter-

nal mapping of the stakeholders inside the organiza-

tions, which plays a signiﬁcant role during software

development. The internal stakeholders are respon-

sible for creating the product backlog, management,

organization operations, and strategies. These peo-

ple are essential to contribute to the strategic vision

of Sustainability and its short or long-term beneﬁts

for the product and organization. They also have the

power to inﬂuence the adoption of Sustainability by

developers and operational levels. We believe soft-

ware developers are important internal stakeholders

because their technical views can drive the decisions.

External stakeholders are people who have fundamen-

tal knowledge about sustainability, know the regula-

tions or by-laws related to this area, and share ex-

periences in other areas that are not related to soft-

ware development. For example, an external stake-

holder can provide an overview of how to operate a

non-organizational institution that ﬁghts hunger and

poverty.

The 03-SDLC stage is to situate the software un-

der construction in which phase of the Software De-

velopment Life Cycle is happening. The software de-

velopment process could help identify SDLC phases

independently of agile or traditional methods. The

difference will be the number of interactions needed

Sustainability-Driven Meetings as a Way to Incorporate Sustainability into Software Development Phases

599

Figure 1: The Sustainability-driven meeting workﬂow.

and the project’s planned schedule. In both ap-

proaches, we see room to accommodate the SusDMs.

For example, suppose the team is using SCRUM, and

the goal of the meeting is to identify sustainability

features. In that case, SusDM can be accommodated

at the backlog reﬁnement meeting to prepare for the

sprint. Of course, at this point, the previous stages

were done. Given their importance and intention, the

discovery and stakeholder map outputs are required in

the SDLC stage.

After ﬁnishing all the previous stages, we can run

the Sustainability-Driven Meeting 04-SusDM. It con-

sists of three steps, deﬁning meeting goals, selecting

sustainability frameworks, documenting, and work-

ing on the actions. The SDLC phase is an input to

determine the meeting goals and, therefore, to estab-

lish the sustainability framework. Examples of meet-

ing goals and sustainability frameworks are discussed

below:

The Sustainability-driven meetings are ﬂexible to

be adopted by any business domain and at any phase

of software development. We list some examples of

the different purposes of this meeting: Software Re-

quirements: Derive software features that will con-

tribute to society in one or more sustainability dimen-

sions.

Software Design. Identify sustainability approaches

that can be designed or avoided in the software before

its development.

Software Architecture. Decide which software ar-

chitecture approaches will contribute to sustainability.

Software Construction. Identify the efﬁciency, re-

sponse time, and use of software resources in order to

reduce the environmental impacts of its use or devel-

opment.

Software Testing. Identify actors from the society

that could test and validate the sustainability features.

List the sustainability metrics reached by software us-

age.

Software Development Process. Reﬂect on the im-

provement of software development and whether it is

sustainable or not to keep from the organization, prod-

uct, and team perspective.

Once the meeting goal is deﬁned, we can combine

the existing sustainability frameworks into the meet-

ing and the software development. The sustainability

frameworks are discussed in section 4 based on an on-

going systematic literature review.

The last step is to document the meeting results,

which means all the notes taken during the meeting

should ﬁnd their way into any tools used for track-

ing. The meeting output could be: a) the results and

next steps of the discussion, and b) framework us-

age/feedback for further reference. The meeting out-

come can be related to its goals as well. For example,

if the goal were to discover new sustainability features

of the software, then the outcome would be a list of

these features and, perhaps, a detailed user story.

As recommended by (Tøndel et al., 2019), the

meeting participants can evaluate the meeting out-

comes. In our case, it is also valuable to assess the

SusDM as well, so we adapted some of the grades

proposed:

• Great: We are doing great during the meeting and

the goal will be reached, no further improvement

is needed.

• Good: We know we could be better, but we are

fairly satisﬁed with the current practice. We hope

to reach the goal.

• Somewhat: We are doing some things, the goal

seems ok, but we really should improve the

Sustainability-driven meeting.

ENASE 2023 - 18th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering

600

• Lacking: We are doing close to nothing during the

meeting and are far from realizing the goal pro-

posed in the meeting.

4 SOFTWARE SUSTAINABILITY

FRAMEWORKS

We identiﬁed through an ongoing Systematic Litera-

ture Review that Software Requirements are the most

explored software development life cycle phase in

terms of suggesting models or frameworks. From the

software engineering perspective, we have selected

the frameworks proposed in the literature that has

shown evidence of their applications and could be a

tool for the SusDM facilitation to achieve its goals as

described in Table 1.

4.1 Software Requirements

Software requirements activities explicitly provide

conditions to achieve sustainable software from both

perspectives: product and process (Calero et al.,

2022). The proposed frameworks in the studies se-

lected provide instructions for their usage by the

software development teams allowing us to recom-

mend them as a tool to facilitate Sustainability-driven

meetings ((Hinai and Chitchyan, 2016), (Condori-

Fernandez and Lago, 2019), (Duboc et al., 2020),(Al-

buquerque et al., 2021)).

Generic requirements identiﬁcation was proposed

by (Hinai and Chitchyan, 2016) based on core soci-

etal values, such as equality and fairness, which are

connected with social sustainability goals. The au-

thor analyzes six sample studies and creates equity

value patterns from them. The patterns created and

how they were interpreted provide insights into so-

cial sustainability. During the SusDM, it can facili-

tate the identiﬁcation of requirements related to so-

cial sustainability and work ”as an enabler for these

concerns to be integrated into the SE (software engi-

neering) practice” (Hinai and Chitchyan, 2016).

(Condori-Fernandez and Lago, 2019) proposed a

software Sustainability-Quality Model(SQM) to sup-

port software engineers in identifying relevant qual-

ity attributes, such as integrity, user error protection,

learnability, interoperability, modiﬁability, adaptabil-

ity, capacity, and co-existence. These qualities were

categorized into a sustainability dimension, making it

easy to connect with real sustainability issues. This

model could facilitate addressing non-functional sus-

tainability requirements and evaluating them based on

the identiﬁed quality attributes.

Table 1: Mapping the existing sustainability tools to facili-

tate SusDM by SDLC.

SDLC/Sustainability Tool Dimension

- Software Requirements:

Values patterns for social sustain-

ability requirements. (Hinai and

Chitchyan, 2016)

Social

Software Sustainability Quality

Model (SQM) (Condori-Fernandez

and Lago, 2019)

Soc., Env.,

Tech., Eco.

Sustainability Awareness Framework

and Diagram (SusAF and SusAD)

(Duboc et al., 2020)

Soc., Env.,

Tech.,

Eco., Ind.

Sustainability Requirements catalog

(Albuquerque et al., 2021)

Soc., Tech.

- Software Design:

Software Sustainability Assessment

Framework (SAF). Sustainability

Quality Model (SQ model) and the

Architectural Decision Map (DM)

(Lago, 2019) (Condori-Fernandez

et al., 2020)

Soc., Env.,

Tech., Eco.

- Software Architecture:

Architectural Decision Map (DM)

(Lago, 2019) (Condori-Fernandez

et al., 2020)

Soc., Env.,

Tech., Eco.

- Software Construction:

Characteristics and Sub-

Characteristics of Software Sus-

tainability Evaluation (Ahmad et al.,

2016)

Env., Soc.,

Eco.

- Software Testing:

Support for Participant Involvement

in Rapid and Agile software devel-

opment Lab (SPIRAL) user involve-

ment scheme (Kopec et al., 2018)

Social

- Software Process Improvement:

Mapping between Software Pro-

cess Improvement (SPI) and Social

Responsibility issues based on

ISO26000 Evaluation. (Messnarz

et al., 2014)

Social

Sustainability-Driven Meetings as a Way to Incorporate Sustainability into Software Development Phases

601

The sustainability Awareness Framework (SusAF)

aims to raise awareness of the sustainability effects of

software. It is a question-based framework to guide

the discussion with stakeholders (Duboc et al., 2020).

As part of software requirements, it can engage the

stakeholders in software sustainability concerns. The

results of its discussion can be represented in a Sus-

tainability Awareness Diagram (SusAD), a visualiza-

tion tool used to highlight the chains of effects (Duboc

et al., 2020). During the SusDM, these frameworks

can help in the discovery phase of software require-

ments and visualize each effect.

The implementation and measure of non-

functional requirements are not trivial, as studies

regarding this topic conﬁrm (Albuquerque et al.,

2021). The challenges seen by the experts are related

to technical skills, tooling, testing, and metrics

related to non-functional requirements. Aiming to

facilitate this meeting, a sustainability catalog can

be used by the people involved in implementing this

software (Albuquerque et al., 2021). This catalog

will also help identify the relationship between the

non-functional requirements and how they affect each

other, neither positively nor negatively. It will clarify

the sustainability concerns and who contributes to

enabling sustainability in the software (Albuquerque

et al., 2021).

4.2 Software Design and Software

Architecture

Social-technical decisions regarding the software

structure are made during the software design phase.

In this case, the software design can also address

the sustainability dimensions, such as social, en-

vironmental, and economic. We suggest that a

Sustainability-driven meeting can help with the dis-

cussion regarding sustainability concerns and help to

decide which path to go towards Sustainable software.

In this case, both tools can be combined as pro-

posed by (Condori-Fernandez et al., 2020) (Lago,

2019). First, a tool to create awareness about the as-

pects of each sustainability dimension based on the

domain and software goal. Second, the decision maps

can be elaborated to allow software designers to de-

cide the most critical aspect to implement in their soft-

ware. The beneﬁt of the decision maps is extended to

Software Architecture (Lago, 2019).

4.3 Software Construction

During the Software Construction, one checkpoint

can be made to assess whether the software’s efﬁ-

ciency, response time, and resource utilization aim

to reduce the environmental impacts related to its us-

age or development. (Ahmad et al., 2016) proposed a

way to evaluate the sustainability of the software un-

der development based on goal-oriented approaches.

An example of deﬁning the goal of software sustain-

ability evaluation for an environmental dimension is

(Ahmad et al., 2016) : ”Purposes: To evaluate the

utilized resources behavior of computer systems dur-

ing testing or operation in order to improve it. Per-

spectives: Examine the input-output resource utiliza-

tion from the user, developer, maintainers, and SQA

point of view. Environmental: the following context

of quality of use of resources towards environmental

impacts.” During the SusDM, the list of characteris-

tics and sub-characteristics can be veriﬁed in the soft-

ware construction phase. If not implemented, it can

be turned into actions and backlog items to be deliv-

ered in the sprint, for example.

4.4 Software Testing

User participation in co-design software was studied

by (Kopec et al., 2018) focusing on old adults, but

it also can be generalized to other groups of people.

The intention of SPIRAL (Support for Participant In-

volvement in Rapid and Agile software development

Lab) is to develop a co-design approach that engages

the end-user participation in the phases of deﬁning an

idea, analyzing, designing, prototyping, and testing

(Kopec et al., 2018). The contribution of this study

is a set of design steps to include people and promote

participatory software development of a product.

In software testing, having the actual end-users

test the Software is essential to guarantee its func-

tional requirements. Once the user is involved, much

information can be collected to enhance the software

product. In the SPIRAL proposal, ”the least advanced

users may participate in the idea generation and test-

ing phases, more advanced can join the design and

analysis stages, whereas the most advanced can take

part in the full development cycle as experts” (Kopec

et al., 2018).

4.5 Software Process Improvement

Social Responsibility concerns can be part of Soft-

ware Process Improvement (SPI) principles (Mess-

narz et al., 2014). The mapping between the ISO

26000 - Social Responsibility and SPI Manifesto was

created to demonstrate how they are connected. The

SPI manifesto can be used in SusDM to reﬂect what

needs to be improved in the software development

process toward social responsibility.

One of the SPI principles is ”create a learning or-

ENASE 2023 - 18th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering

602

ganization,” which is about facilitating learning and

sharing experiences. Inﬂuenced by this principle, the

SusDM meeting opens the door to learning about soft-

ware sustainability. The contribution of (Messnarz

et al., 2014) is to serve as a checklist where the in-

ternal and external stakeholders can help to assess

whether these principles and social responsibilities

are addressed.

This section discussed in which moment of soft-

ware development the meeting can be addressed,

which frameworks can be used as facilitating tools

to promote the discussion, and the argument why use

each of them. The software development team can

decide when it is the moment to add this meeting. We

aim to apply this meeting in action research design to

understand how software development companies can

adopt SusDM.

5 CONCLUSIONS

In this paper, we argued that a Sustainability-driven

meeting is a practical way to address sustainability

concerns, create sustainability awareness and realis-

tically adopt sustainability during the software de-

velopment by using existing evidenced sustainability

frameworks. Throughout the paper, we discussed the

meeting workﬂow considering the stages of discover-

ing, mapping stakeholders, identifying SDLC phases,

and running the SusDM.

The main idea is to hold this meeting in agile soft-

ware development teams following the focus group

research method (Stewart et al., 2007). We want to

observe the participants’ engagement and interactions

during the application of the sustainability framework

chosen for their context based on steps 01, 02 and 03

of the preparation for the SusDM. We plan to con-

duct this research with the action research method,

as we want to understand the problem, propose solu-

tions collaboratively, and run feedback loops (Davi-

son et al., 2004). In the end, we want to assess

how valuable these meetings are for developers and

how knowledge about software sustainability has im-

proved after starting these meetings.

While other approaches focus mainly on general

sustainability awareness or speciﬁc phases of soft-

ware development (Calero et al., 2022), the SusDM

is proposed to be added at any phase of software de-

velopment. The SusDM gives the software develop-

ment team ﬂexibility regarding when it needs to exe-

cute and which tools can be used to reach the meeting

goal. The meeting can be assessed to ﬁnd value in

rerunning it or improving it for the next rounds.

The meeting proposed in this paper combines ex-

isting sustainability frameworks into software devel-

opment phases to facilitate the meeting and increase

the prioritization of sustainability. In addition, it pro-

vides examples of SusDM goals that can be addressed

during software development and how they should be

initiated in the organization, as stated in the workﬂow

section. Further work will explore how SusDM can

be adopted in software development companies. We

expect to validate the suggestion, collect feedback and

improve it to be operational in any software develop-

ment context.

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