Exploring Social Sustainability Alignment in Software Development

Projects

Ana Carolina Moises de Souza

, Kaban Koochakpour

, Soﬁa Papavlasopoulou

and Letizia Jaccheri

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

Keywords:

Software Sustainability, Sustainable Development Goals, Software Development, Sustainable Software

Engineering, Software Social Impacts.

Abstract:

Socially sustainable software, developed with an emphasis on individual well-being, social justice, and social

development, can positively impact society. In order to develop real-world software projects, a software en-

gineering course was established to connect students and companies. This course allows students to address

sustainability issues by creating solutions for problems proposed by companies, who are treated as customers.

This study explores the alignment of students and customers about social sustainability. An analysis of twelve

project proposals and twelve ﬁnal reports from 67 students revealed that seven customers explicitly mentioned

social sustainability. Surprisingly, only three student groups incorporated it into their projects. Two groups ad-

dressed the concerns raised by customers, and one proactively tackled social sustainability despite no explicit

demand. This study presents a novel approach that integrates social sustainability into software engineering,

evaluating alignment between customer demands and student responses. Discussions cover potential chal-

lenges and improvements in the software development process, proposing initial steps toward a foundational

guideline for active engagement in social sustainability by both students and companies.

1 INTRODUCTION

Academic courses are designed to match industry and

academy needs in terms of educating and preparing

new professionals to work with customers by hav-

ing real experience on software development projects

(Andersen et al., 1994) (Paasivaara et al., 2019). Each

party recognizes the beneﬁts of this, including the op-

portunity for students to apply their learning and for

customers to obtain a minimum viable product, proof

of concept, feasibility study, and functional software.

Initial investigations about software and sustain-

ability have happened in academic courses (Peters

et al., 2023). For instance the Sustainability Aware-

ness Framework was ﬁrst assessed in the academic

settings (Duboc et al., 2019). Another example is a

previous study by Cico et al., focused on identify-

ing sustainability issues in companies or customers

proposals by mapping them to the Sustainable Devel-

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

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7214-8651

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1974-0522

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

opment Goals (SDGs) (Nations, 2015). The results

revealed a positive alignment between 10 out of 17

SDGs covered by the customers proposals indicating

a promising implicit intention to address sustainabil-

ity, especially social sustainability. However, a rec-

ognized gap is how the students incorporated sustain-

ability in their reports with respect to what was ini-

tially proposed by the customers from a societal per-

spective(Cico et al., 2021). This highlights the need

for further research to determine the extent of sustain-

ability integration in software development. There-

fore, while researchers are proposing methods, frame-

works, practices, and guidance on addressing sustain-

ability in software, there is still an opportunity to vali-

date these approaches between industry and academic

practitioners (Cico et al., 2021) (Oyedeji et al., 2021).

Our study aims to explore how social sustainabil-

ity concerns are aligned between customers and stu-

dents in software development projects of a software

engineering course. The main goal of this course is to

develop a working software product for a company,

which we call customer, based on their project pro-

posal. The participants of this course were 67 stu-

dents and 12 customers from different sectors. Since

250

Moises de Souza, A., Koochakpour, K., Papavlasopoulou, S. and Jaccheri, L.

Exploring Social Sustainability Alignment in Software Development Projects.

DOI: 10.5220/0012739600003687

Paper published under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering (ENASE 2024), pages 250-261

ISBN: 978-989-758-696-5; ISSN: 2184-4895

we did not establish any predeﬁned research ques-

tions or hypothesis we chose the grounded theory

method (Glaser, 1978) (Strauss and Corbin, 1998)

(Charmaz, 2006) to analyze customer proposals and

students’ reports through the lens of the social sus-

tainability dimension (Brundtland, 1987). Moreover,

since we were comparing the customers’ proposals

against students’ reports, we analyzed the documents

using a two-case model analysis in the tool called

MAXQDA

. As part of the grounded theory method,

the theoretical coding helped to reveal the relationship

between social sustainability concerns, SDGs, and so-

cially sustainable software practices.

Based on our document analysis, we have identi-

ﬁed that the customer proposes projects that address

social sustainability concerning well-being and good

health, social justice, participatory society, and com-

munity development. The data suggests that both cus-

tomer requirements and software requirements play a

crucial role in determining which sustainability con-

cerns the software will aim to tackle. As a result,

customers who explicitly incorporated social sustain-

ability concerns into their proposals had their solu-

tions developed by the students with those concerns in

mind. Another ﬁnding was the student’s potential to

reﬂect on social sustainability beyond what was ini-

tially stated by the customer in their proposals. De-

spite these promising results, 2 out of 12 customers

did not mention in their proposal how the project

would target sustainability issues, while the other 3

out of 12 customers addressed the environmental di-

mension. Further research to investigate the reasons

behind these results is necessary to fully understand

the challenges in addressing social sustainability con-

cerns from both sides. Finally, our study shed light on

the importance of aligning social sustainability con-

cerns in a software development project which can be

extended to real projects as well.

This paper consists of eight sections. Section 2

reviews related work on software courses and social

sustainability. Section 3 outlines the course settings.

The research method is detailed in section 4, while

section 5 presents the ﬁndings. Discussions are pro-

vided in section 6, followed by limitations and future

work in section 7. Section 8 concludes the paper.

2 RELATED WORK

Social sustainability in software development is an

interdisciplinary ﬁeld, which urges empirical valida-

tion of its implications in the practice (McGuire et al.,

https://www.maxqda.com/

2023),(Swacha, 2022). Social sustainability refers to

social equity between generations, aiming to extend

all opportunities for fulﬁlling aspirations for a better

life, health, and well-being, recognized as essential

for all human beings (Brundtland, 1987). Betz et al.

states “Social Sustainability debt is the hidden effect

of decisions about software that negatively affect so-

cial justice, equity, and fairness, or which lead to an

erosion of trust in society” (Betz et al., 2015). Soft-

ware promotes direct support to social communities in

various domains and includes activities or processes

that indirectly contribute to the well-being of these

communities (Lago et al., 2015). Social sustainabil-

ity can be inﬂuenced by software, particularly when

it introduces social threats, raises concerns in society,

and impacts individual trust (de Souza et al., 2023).

Therefore, designing socially sustainable software re-

quires a systemic view of societal issues, threats, so-

cial aspects, and human factors.

The relation between Social Sustainability and the

Sustainable Development Goals in Software Engi-

neering is mapped in the study proposed by (Calero

et al., 2022). In this study SDGs can be targeted not

only during the process of developing a software but

also as the product contributing to target the goal it-

self. Moreover (Seyff et al., 2022) proposed a pilot

mapping study to demonstrate the feasibility of tar-

geting the SDGs with the application of Sustainability

Awareness Framework questions (Duboc et al., 2019)

(Duboc et al., 2020). As the authors mentioned, this

mapping will help the industry “partner in better un-

derstanding whether their proposed changes will sup-

port or violate speciﬁc SDGs.”

Peters et al. investigated the landscape of sus-

tainability integration in computing education (Pe-

ters et al., 2023). The ﬁndings indicate that while

there is evidence that sustainability education is val-

ued by students, there is a need for a transformative

approach in computing education that challenges ex-

isting norms and values, contributing to democratic

change. The study emphasizes the importance of

incorporating sustainability not as an isolated topic

but as an integral part of evolving educational prac-

tices and processes. While Peters et al.’s study con-

tributed to the broad deﬁnition of sustainability in

educational settings, the conceptualization of “incre-

mental changes” in a course to integrate sustainability

aligns with the study we are presenting here. Another

ﬁnding related to our research is about the relevant

studies that recognizes “the value of Computer Sci-

ence (CS) or (Information Technology) IT as an en-

abler to address many of the society-wide sustainabil-

ity issues.”

Exploring Social Sustainability Alignment in Software Development Projects

251

In 2018, a study investigated the role of Informa-

tion and Communication Technologies (ICT) tools in

facilitating social innovation within a course (Pappas

et al., 2018). The course focuses on teaching stu-

dents cooperation skills through a project by practic-

ing an experiential learning cycle where students col-

laborated to generate innovative ideas for SDGs. The

initial phase of the social innovation process involved

identifying societal issues, and students reported that

the use of ICT tools assisted them in developing ideas

to address these concerns.

In 2019, another study delved into the participa-

tion of female students in software engineering tasks

and team dynamics (Nguyen-Duc et al., 2019). The

analysis of student reports from 2015 to 2017 revealed

that female students were more engaged in project

management and requirement engineering. However,

they remained underrepresented in specialized activi-

ties, indicating a gender gap of 66.6 percent between

male and female students.

In 2021, researchers conducted a deductive the-

matic analysis of project proposals for software de-

velopment from 45 companies spanning from 2018

to 2020 to map the SDGs (Cico et al., 2021). The

proposals addressed societal issues related to the en-

vironment, social constraints, and economic dimen-

sions, classifying them into the 10 SDGs

. In (Cico

et al., 2021) study, the companies did not explicitly

mention sustainability issues in their proposals.

The studies mentioned above are indeed related to

sustainability and provide insights into how sustain-

ability concerns have been addressed in these courses.

They contribute to various sustainability aspects, such

as using ICT tools for social innovation, the partic-

ipation of female students in software engineering

tasks, and mapping SDGs in companies’ proposals.

In our study, our primary focus is to identify the so-

cial sustainability concerns that customers and stu-

dents have addressed in the solutions developed dur-

ing the course. This study takes place in the aspects

of a software engineering course that aims to expose

students to unknown problems while delivering a soft-

ware solution to a speciﬁc customer. The course has

been adapted to deal with social innovation address-

ing social changes from generation to generation.

SDG 2: Zero Hunger, SDG 3: Good Health and Well-

being, SDG 4: Quality Education, SDG 7: Affordable and

Clean Energy, SDG 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth,

SDG 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities, SDG 12:

Responsible Consumption and Production, SDG 13: Cli-

mate Action, SDG 14: Life Below Water, SDG 16: Peace,

Justice, and Strong Institutions

3 THE COURSE SETTINGS

The Customer-Driven Project course is a Master de-

gree course (Cico et al., 2021). Its iteration ofﬁ-

cially started with a ﬁrst meeting with all actors of the

course (i.e. students, customers, teachers, and teach-

ing assistants) in August 2022. During the meeting,

the students, after they have been assigned to groups,

met with their customer (each group has one cus-

tomer). Proposals from 12 customers have been se-

lected and formed into 12 student groups, intending to

balance the gender, country of origin (National or In-

ternational) and technical knowledge of the students.

The customers’ proposals were presented during the

ﬁrst meeting. The students also received an introduc-

tion to the report structure and what was required for

the semester. A compendium with all the important

topics to cover in a project was shared, as well as the

previous year’s students’ reports. The students were

free to choose their project roles based on their expe-

riences or willingness.

The ﬁnal proposals and the customers were se-

lected in a group meeting with ﬁve teaching assistants

and two professors. The selection criteria relied on

the solution description, project goal, and customer

proﬁle. Sustainability was not one of the requirements

for the selection of customers’ proposals. However, as

a ﬁrst step to address sustainability in the course, the

question “How does the project target sustainability

issues?” was added to the customer proposal form.

After that, we communicated accepted and rejected

proposals to the respective Customers.

The students worked to develop the solutions for

their customers throughout the semester, and each

pair (group and company) agreed upon the ﬁnal de-

liverable. In this case, for the validation of the solu-

tion and proposal, the group delivered a report that in-

cluded the following: the background of the customer,

problem, potential solution, software requirements,

architectural diagrams, user cases, user story spec-

iﬁcation, tools, project management details, coding

techniques, testing techniques and evidence, sprint re-

ports, group dynamics, self-reﬂection about the re-

sults, course, and other items.

4 RESEARCH METHOD

For this study, we used the inductive approach of

Grounded Theory (GT), which aims to propose the-

ories from an examination of data rather than being

deductively derived (Glaser, 1978). The practice of

grounded theory concerns the construction of codes

and analytical categories from data, avoiding pre-

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252

conceived and logically deduced hypotheses (Char-

maz, 2006). Therefore, according to the author’s

perspective, the theory emerges through constant and

comparative methods applied to each collected data

point (Bandeira-De-Mello and Cunha, 2003). The

goal is to gradually develop a more comprehensive

theory by reﬁning and expanding the codes until

reaching the central category. While the primary ob-

jective of the grounded theory method is to construct

substantive theories, its application can extend be-

yond obtaining a substantive theory alone. According

to (Strauss and Corbin, 1998), researchers can choose

to employ speciﬁc elements of the grounded theory

process to achieve their study goals. Thus, whether

Glaserian or Straussian, it is important to explicitly

state which method was used.

In our study, we chose to adhere to Glaser’s

method, as we aimed to approach the ﬁeld without

predetermined research questions. Our focus was on

having a general interest in the topic and allowing

the concepts and categories to emerge from the data

in a more ﬂexible manner, departing from the more

prescribed approach of the Straussian method. The

Glaserian method emphasizes the constant compari-

son of data and codes throughout the analysis process.

This involves continually comparing new data with

previously analyzed data to identify similarities, dif-

ferences, and patterns, which helps reﬁne the emerg-

ing theory. In this study, the new data stopped ap-

pearing when we reached out 24 documents analyzed.

While grounded theory is still a ﬂexible and recom-

mended method for constant comparative analysis,

our work relied on limited sources such as documents.

Further research aiming to identify the challenges and

motivators to addressing social sustainability such as

interviews with students and customers could be ben-

eﬁcial to contribute to an in-depth deﬁnition of so-

cially sustainable software.

Therefore, the steps from the grounded theory that

was performed in this research are: a) data collec-

tion in which students’ reports and customer propos-

als were collected; b) open coding in the documents

using MAXQDA software for data qualitative anal-

ysis; c) selective coding to identify relationships be-

tween codes that might explain the in-vivo codes from

the previous steps; d) theoretical coding, where the

codes from selective coding explain the central cate-

gory until no more new ﬁndings emerge from the doc-

uments selected. In the next subsections, we explain

the method and procedure in detail.

4.1 Data Collection

Data collection was conducted in two stages:

a) Customer proposal submission: During this

stage, a customer form was created, which included

sustainability question. Before the course began, the

customers ﬁlled out the form. Once the selection pro-

cess was completed, the proposals were shared with

the students as an initial description for their project.

b) Student group reports delivery: The second

stage took place during the semester. Students worked

on developing their solutions while considering sus-

tainability issues. Subsequently, the students deliv-

ered their reports following the course guidelines and

evaluation criteria. Later, the reports were evaluated

and graded at the end of the semester.

Following the completion of the course, we initi-

ated the analysis of the documents and uploaded them

to the MAXQDA tool for further examination. We

organized the documents into two different groups:

Customer Proposals and Student Reports. In the fol-

lowing sections, we explain how the data was ana-

lyzed.

4.2 Open Coding

After uploading the documents to MAXQDA, the

reading part started. The ﬁrst round of open cod-

ing was conducted on the customers’ proposals. In

MAXQDA, the “in-vivo” functionality facilitates the

open coding process, which allows the researcher to

select the exact text informed by the data. In-vivo

coding helps the researcher explicitly ﬁnd evidence

conﬁrming or placing a code. For example, we ex-

tracted code as “decision about where to live and

what to prioritize” that contributes to sustainability

goal number “SDG11-Sustainable Cities and Com-

munities”. Constant comparison between codes and

documents helped to identify more occurrences of the

same information.

This step was carried out for all other documents.

Once the open coding of the Customers’ proposals

was completed, we continued to perform the same

process on the student reports. The challenge was

explicitly to identify a mention and reﬂection about

social sustainability in the students’ reports.

4.3 Selective Coding

The idea behind selective coding is to assign mean-

ing to the chosen open codes, group them together,

and discover the connections between the ﬁndings.

The process of selective coding was conducted in two

rounds.

In the ﬁrst round, we focused on identifying gen-

eral concepts related to sustainability. For instance,

we recognized the social aspect concept of “Suitable

Exploring Social Sustainability Alignment in Software Development Projects

253

place to live”, which pertains to appropriate commu-

nity and city facilities for citizens, fostering social

development. Therefore, this concept provided an

explanation for the coded statement “decision about

where to live and what to prioritize.”

In the second round, we aimed to identify the

SDGs explicitly mentioned in the customer proposals

and student reports. Through this analysis, the cate-

gories of SDGs began to emerge from the data. This

allowed us to proceed to the fourth step, theoretical

coding, in which we reﬁned the codes and relation-

ships.

4.4 Theoretical Coding and Two-Case

Model Analysis

Theoretical coding involved a continuous comparison

of student reports, customer proposals and codes un-

til we could identify the central category that encap-

sulated all the ﬁndings. To establish the relationships

between each code, we assigned names to these rela-

tionships. We discovered eight types of relationships

by using two-case model analysis in MAXQDA: en-

ables, promotes, targets, positively impacts, is part

of, is directly or indirectly presented in, implements

a, proposes a.

The relationships can be explained as follows:

The in-vivo code report the social sustainability con-

cerns that will enable the concepts of social aspects to

be targeted. For instance, these concerns are solved

by identifying software requirements that promote

the social aspects associated with social sustainabil-

ity. These concepts of social aspects target the SDGs,

which positively impacts the social dimension that is

part of sustainability. The students and/or the cus-

tomers explicitly or implicitly presented a reﬂection

on sustainability in their report or proposal. Finally,

based on two-case model analysis, we could identify

that a student group implements a socially sustainable

software product when a customer proposes a socially

sustainable software product (refer to Figure 1. We

describe in detail the ﬁndings of this analysis in the

next section.

5 FINDINGS

Aiming to explore the alignment of how social sus-

tainability concerns were addressed by both parties,

we explain the ﬁndings based on the Customers’ and

Students’ reﬂections on the same issues, different is-

sues, or did not reﬂect. Moreover, we will discuss

the reﬂections made only by Customers. Table 3

presents a summary of the alignments.

5.1 Customers and Students Reﬂecting

on the Same Social Sustainability

Concerns

In this section we present the ﬁndings pairing the

respective customer with the student group. The

two-case analysis model enabled us to consistently

compare codes identiﬁed in students’ and customers’

documents. The concepts in Table 1 contribute to

achieving the SDGs and Social Sustainability Dimen-

sion. The in-vivo statements from the documents pro-

vide further information about the social sustainabil-

ity concerns, and we explain how the students imple-

mented them in the software.

Table 1: Customers and Students reﬂected on the same sus-

tainability issues.

IDs Concepts SDGs

C02/SG02 Suitable place to live SDG11

C12/SG12 Good health, Well-being SDG03

The C02 proposal was to develop a software

aimed to provide information about community facil-

ities based on user preferences, facilitating informed

decisions about neighborhood and housing selection.

The concept of a “Suitable place to live” was derived

from the Customer’s proposal and rephrased by the

authors. Their report included the following state-

ment:“decision about where to live and what to pri-

oritize [C02].” The customer explicitly linked it with

SDG11-Sustainable Cities and Communities, which

falls under the Social dimension of sustainability.

From the student’s report, the user story was targeting

this social sustainability issue: “ﬁnd a suitable area

for me to live [SG02].” Consequently, the students

translated this sustainability issue into a software re-

quirement for their proposed solution. Based on this

analysis, we can infer that the students addressed sus-

tainability in their project by implementing functional

requirements that contribute to achieving SDG11 (see

Figure 1). By translating the social sustainability con-

cerns into software requirements and implementing

the features we can infer that Socially Sustainable

Software was created to assist individuals in locating

a residence that aligns with their needs.

The Customer C12 proposed a software product

which the goal was to encourage people to improve

their health by exercising. One code identiﬁed in

C12 was about “encouraging healthier lifestyles can

prevent illnesses [C12]”. This ﬁnding was summa-

rized with the “Good Health” concept and linked

to SDG03-Good Health and Well-Being, categorized

under the Social dimension of sustainability. Al-

though company C12 does not explicitly mention

ENASE 2024 - 19th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering

254

Figure 1: Two-Case Model Analysis Company 02 x Stu-

dents Group 02.

SDG03, it provides detailed information on how the

software product contributes to social healthcare. For

instance, they stated “using technology and encour-

aging healthier lifestyles can prevent illnesses and ab-

sence from work”. In contrast, the student group ex-

plicitly stated how the software product aligns with

SDG03 in their report. An example of their state-

ment is “project focuses on improving individual

quality of sleep [SG12]” and categorized into “Well-

being”. Furthermore, they highlight the software

product’s role in making sleep healthcare more acces-

sible. Thus, creating a Socially Sustainable Software

Product involves making wellness and social health-

care accessible to society.

Highlights

A socially sustainable software addresses social

concerns related to housing, community, and indi-

vidual well-being, helping to target SDGs 11 and

03.

5.2 Customers and Students Reﬂecting

on Different Social Sustainability

Concerns

It is noticed from the analysis of the documents that

some of the respective Customer and Student groups

did not reﬂect on the same sustainability issues and

SDGs based on this analysis. In the customer C03

proposal, the goal of the software was to make eye

examinations accessible on a small device. While

Customer C03 reﬂected on “sensitive data protec-

tion”, Student Group SG03 reﬂected on “access to

equal rights”, “good health”, “well-being”, and a “fair

workload”. The students added an “Inclusion and

Sustainability” section to the compendium and dis-

cussed each of the identiﬁed SDGs of the project.

Customer C09 propose a virtual reality solu-

tion which aims to experience art from anywhere

by pointing to QR codes. The customer implic-

itly focused on SDG11-Sustainable Cities and Com-

munities, speciﬁcally emphasizing the environmen-

tal dimension, highlighting the concept of “raising

awareness about the environmental impact”. In con-

trast, Student Group SG09 included sustainability-

related statements in their report but were not ex-

plicitly linked to the SDGs. The evidence found

in their report was part of functional requirements

list were: “Allow cultural diversity” and “Compati-

ble assistive technologies” aligned with the objectives

of SDG10-Reduced Inequalities, while “Enable par-

ticipatory processes” was implicitly associated with

SDG16-Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions. In this

case, inclusion and diversity are the social concerns

addressed in this software. Thus, to be able to de-

velop a socially sustainable those concerns must be

prioritize.

For SDG10-Reduced Inequalities, the in-vivo

codes such as “display different languages depend-

ing [SG09]” and “compatible with assistive technolo-

gies i.e., screen readers [SG09]” were extracted from

the Student Group’s report. Additionally, codes like

“user should be able to rate/give feedback [SG09]”

and “app is usable with my abilities and limitations

[SG09]” were classiﬁed under SDG16-Peace, Justice

and Strong Institutions. These codes highlight the

importance of institutions leading participatory pro-

cesses that involve and consider individuals in soft-

ware development. Customer C09 primarily con-

centrated on proposing environmental contributions

within their solutions, while Student Group SG09 ad-

dressed concerns related to social sustainability.

Exploring Social Sustainability Alignment in Software Development Projects

255

Highlights

A socially sustainable software addresses social

concerns related to access to healthcare, data pri-

vacy, diversity and community involvement, help-

ing to target SDGs 03, 10 and 16.

5.3 Only Customers Reﬂecting on

Social Sustainability Concerns

The ﬁndings presented in this section emphasize the

contrast between the customers who incorporated sus-

tainability aspects in their proposals and their cor-

responding student groups that did not. In Table 2,

we summarize the concepts exclusively present in the

customer’s proposals but absent in the student group

reports.

Customer C01 explicitly engaged with the Sus-

tainable Development Goals ”3-Good Health and

Well-being”. They elaborated on how their software

product could contribute to this goal. For instance,

the in-vivo code “good for mental health by reducing

depression [C01]” underscored the software’s objec-

tive of recognizing various knitting patterns, which

are known to have positive effects on mental well-

being.

The SDG17-Partnerships for the Goals is explic-

itly mentioned in Customer C02’s proposal, reﬂect-

ing the possibility of sharing the resulting solution

with other municipalities by stating “spread the tech-

nology to other municipalities [C02]”. This would

enable technology sharing by allowing other parties

to use the software developed by the students. By

addressing this issue in the software, the students

have created socially sustainable software that en-

ables partners to reuse the same technology and pro-

vide similar public services in their own contexts.

Table 2: Only Customers reﬂected on sustainability issues.

IDs Concepts SDGs

C01 Good Health SDG03

C02 Technology sharing SDG17

C08

C11

Enable participatory processes SDG16

More implicitly, Customer C08 addressed

SDG16-Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions by

enabling participatory processes through real user

testing. The corresponding in-vivo code extracted

was “tested with real users [C08]*.” Utilizing

user-centric approaches in software development

has been recognized as both economically and

socially beneﬁcial for involved stakeholders (Kopec

et al., 2018). This ﬁnding emphasizes that Socially

Sustainable Software Products engage and involve

affected individuals in their development.

Another implicit code emerged in C11, concern-

ing “ensure that we build a functioning technology

for people [C11]*” related to social sustainability

and the goal SDG16-Peace, Justice, and Strong In-

stitutions, which emphasizes “Enable participatory

processes.” From this customer’s viewpoint, a So-

cially Sustainable Software Product promotes local

economic growth, enabling locals to explore city ac-

tivities and develop software that facilitates people’s

lives.

In summary, while certain customers actively inte-

grated sustainability considerations into their propos-

als, their corresponding student groups surprisingly

did not reﬂect the same level of attention to sustain-

ability. None of the student’s reports SG01, SG08,

SG11 appeared to mention sustainability issues raised

by the respective customers. With the exception of

SG02, that addressed SDG11 and not SDG17.

Highlights

A socially sustainable software addresses social

concerns related to community involvement, part-

nerships, and mental health, helping to target SDGs

03, 16 and 17.

5.4 Customers and Students not

Reﬂecting on Social Sustainability

Concerns

In this section, we explain the remaining customers

who did not address social sustainability concerns

in their projects. After reviewing Customer C04’s

proposal, it was conﬁrmed that social sustainability

concerns were not addressed. The question related

to sustainability remained unanswered in the docu-

ment. However, upon examining the report of Stu-

dent Group SG04, a dedicated section on sustain-

ability was discovered. Their focus was directed to-

wards economic and environmental sustainability di-

mensions. Furthermore, the report did not mention

SDGs.

Customers C05 and C06 reﬂected on environ-

mental sustainability, but not speciﬁcally mention the

SDGs. Even though SG05 added a section about sus-

tainability in their report, it reﬂected on the same con-

cerns related to sustainability as Customer C05. How-

ever, SG06 did not mention sustainability in their re-

port. The reasons why this might have happened are

argued in the discussion.

Regarding C07’s proposal, the question about how

ENASE 2024 - 19th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering

256

sustainability issues were addressed was left unan-

swered. In contrast, Student Group SG07 reﬂected

on four SDGs related to environmental goals: num-

bers 11, 12, 14, and 15. Most of them are related to

preserving marine life, which is a goal of the solution.

Our analysis of Customer C10 and Student Group

SG10 revealed that neither the company nor the stu-

dents deliberated on sustainability within their respec-

tive documents. Despite the project’s health-related

domain, the customer explicitly expressed that sus-

tainability considerations were not a focal point of the

project. Within SG10’s report, the students mentioned

a requirement for sustainable architecture; however,

they did not establish a clear and explicit connection

to sustainability.

6 DISCUSSION

Our study showed documentary evidence that align-

ing software development endeavors with social sus-

tainability demonstrate a potential and tangible con-

tribution to the society. The data highlights a sym-

biotic relationship between customer-driven sustain-

ability priorities and the subsequent development of

software solutions tailored to address social sustain-

ability concerns. It means that, when customers pri-

oritize sustainability, it inﬂuences the development of

software solutions that align with and address social

sustainability concerns. In this section, we will dis-

cuss the integration of social sustainability into soft-

ware engineering. We also discuss the potential chal-

lenges and improvements in the software develop-

ment process, and provide a steps on how to perform

this integration within the course.

6.1 Integrating Sustainability in

Software Engineering Course

Integrating the sustainability topic into a software en-

gineering course has been the primary goal of univer-

sities striving for a sustainable world. In the review of

(Peters et al., 2023), the efforts made by researchers

to teach software engineering students systems think-

ing, a sustainable mindset, and awareness of the sus-

tainability impacts of their software are more evi-

dent. Our study investigated how both customers and

students were addressing social sustainability during

the process of software product development.. The

question (“How does the project target sustainability

issues?”) introduced in the customer proposal pre-

sented an initial step towards the university goal of

teaching and forming students with a sustainability

mindset.

As Peter et al. argue, introducing sustainability

as a topic may not be enough to cover the broader

facets of sustainability in software. However, since

2018, this course has been exploring the following

sustainability topics in an incremental approach, such

as: a) developing software targeting one of the SDGs

(Pappas et al., 2018), b) analyzing the gender repre-

sentation in software engineering tasks, in alignment

with the SDG5-Gender Equality (Nguyen-Duc et al.,

2019), and c) identifying the relation between cus-

tomer proposals and SDGs (Cico et al., 2021). There-

fore, in this course, incremental changes to approach

sustainability have been made, including the intro-

duction of that question. This study opened up the

opportunity to further explore what improvements re-

garding sustainability integration are required in the

course. Based on the results of our analysis, we iden-

tiﬁed a recommended list of steps to integrate sus-

tainability into a software engineering course with

project-based learning involving companies:

• Organize a software sustainability workshop for

customers before submitting proposals - this will

help them to reﬂect on this aspect even if they

have not thought about it and integrate sustainabil-

ity criteria linked to the Sustainable Development

Goals.

• Update the course compendium to cover software

sustainability topics before the start of the course.

• Give lectures on software sustainability to stu-

dents during the course.

• Evaluate sustainability criteria related to the

SDGs by receiving reports from students.

• Collect feedback from students and customers on

how sustainability was addressed after completing

the course.

Our analysis reveals the maturity of students in

targeting topics not covered in the software engi-

neering curriculum, demonstrating their ability to in-

tegrate sustainability considerations into their soft-

ware products. This ability is particularly evident in

their identiﬁcation and translation of social sustain-

ability concerns into explicit requirements, emphasiz-

ing their alignment with customer demands.

Unlike previous studies, exempliﬁed by (Cico

et al., 2021), which focused on identifying SDGs

within customer proposals, our study took a different

approach. We investigated how social sustainability

concerns were addressed in the solutions delivered by

students, aligning them with the customer proposals.

Surprisingly, our ﬁndings revealed that certain stu-

dents groups unintentionally incorporated SDGs into

their reports, even when these goals were not explic-

itly outlined in the initial customer proposals.

Exploring Social Sustainability Alignment in Software Development Projects

257

Table 3: Summary of SDGs Alignment.

Customer

Sector

Business

Domain

Students

Group

Members

SGDs Social Sus-

tainability

C vs SG

Alignment

Status

Comments Customer Quotes Students Quotes

C01 Private Knitting in-

dustry

SG01 - 6 SDG03 ✓ × Not

Aligned

Students did not address

SDG03 in their report.

”Knitting is good for mental health

by reducing depression and anxiety

which targets Goal 03”

None

C02 Public Cities SG02 - 6 SDG11,

SDG17

✓ ✓ Aligned C02 proposed SDG17 ex-

plicitly but the students re-

ﬂected on SDG11 only.

”Goal 11 sustainable cities and

communities as it enables newcom-

ers to the city to make a well-

informed decision about where to

live and what to prioritize” and

”Goal 17 Partnerships for the goals

as it will spread the technology to

other municipalities”

13 user stories are addressing SDG11. For

instance, ”As a user, I want to personalize

the search to ﬁnd an area that suits my wishes

and needs.”

C03 Private Health SG03 - 5 SDG03,

SDG10,

SDG16

× ✓ Not

Aligned

Students reﬂected on SDG

03 and SDG10 explicitly

in their report. Cus-

tomer implicitly reﬂected

on SDG16

”Sensitive patient data requires

compliance with national privacy

regulations”

”Goal 3 Good Health and Well-being... dis-

tribute workload over health care workers,

causing less work and stress” and ”Goal 10

Reduced Inequalities allowing the patients to

get their eyes scanned closer to their resi-

dence”

C08 Private Content

Manage-

ment

SG08 - 5 SDG16 ✓ × Not

Aligned

Students did not address

SDG16 in their report.

”When it is ready for integration it

will be published to our test servers

and be tested with real users”

None

C09 Private Entertainment SG09 - 5 SDG10,

SDG16

× ✓ Not

Aligned

Students reﬂected implic-

itly on SDG16 and SDG10

while the customer was re-

ﬂecting on SDG11 related

to the environment.

”The experience also clearly may

present the object’s environmental

impact”

Four Functional Requirements related to

SDG10. For instance: ”Compatible with as-

sistive technologies like screen readers and

keyboards”

C11 Private Eco-tourism SG11 - 6 SDG16 ✓ × Not

Aligned

Students did not address

SDG16 in their report.

”A user-centric and participatory

process, to ensure that we build a

functioning technology that people

need”

None

C12 Private Health SG12 - 5 SDG03 ✓ ✓ Aligned Student group explicitly

stated how the software

product aligns with

SDG03.

”Thus, using technology and en-

couraging healthier lifestyles can

prevent illnesses and absence from

work and thereby facilitates sus-

tainability of the health care sys-

tem”

”Improving individual quality of sleep,

which is a personal health issue and ﬁts goal

3: Good Health and Well Being”

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258

Our ﬁndings echo the study by Oyedeji et al.

(2021) (Oyedeji et al., 2021), which sought to under-

stand academic and industry perceptions of software

sustainability. Their research emphasizes the need

for common standards in software engineering curric-

ula to include software sustainability and highlights

the importance of cross-disciplinary collaboration be-

tween academia and industry in addressing sustain-

ability dimensions. This collaboration is evident in

our study through the customer proposals and the po-

tential for software products to address sustainability

goals developed by the students, who are future soft-

ware engineers mindful of sustainability concerns.

6.2 Potential Challenges

Heldal et al. conducted interviews with 28 organiza-

tions in nine different countries to explore their per-

spectives on sustainability (Heldal et al., 2023). The

results revealed a signiﬁcant demand from companies

for skills and knowledge in sustainability. To address

this gap, many companies have implemented internal

sustainability training programs. The discussion in-

cludes insights into current practices within compa-

nies aimed at mitigating the sustainability skill gap.

While our study focused on document analysis, it

highlights the same challenges as (Heldal et al., 2023)

related to the sustainability knowledge domain among

customers and students. The potential challenges in

the alignment of social sustainability in software de-

velopment identiﬁed during this study are revealed:

Deﬁciency in Formal Sustainability Knowledge.

The study identiﬁed a signiﬁcant challenge in the

form of a lack of formal knowledge and skills in sus-

tainability among both customers and students. This

deﬁciency hampers their ability to specify detailed

requirements that address sustainability concerns in

software development projects.

Insufﬁcient Intuitive Understanding of Sustain-

ability. The study also revealed a lack of basic aware-

ness or intuitive understanding of sustainability prin-

ciples. This gap in knowledge impedes the ability of

customers and students to incorporate sustainability

considerations into their projects effectively.

Neglect of Sustainability Reﬂection. The study

found that some students failed to reﬂect on sustain-

ability issues, even when these were explicitly men-

tioned in the project proposals provided by customers.

This ﬁnding suggests a disconnect between project re-

quirements and the awareness or priorities of students.

Discrepancy Between Customer and Developer

Priorities. The study observed instances where there

was a mismatch between the sustainability concerns

of customers and those of the students. This discrep-

ancy can result in projects that fail to adequately ad-

dress sustainability concerns.

Inconsistency in Sustainability Focus. The study

noted that different pairs of customers and student

groups targeted different sustainability issues and

Sustainable Development Goals. This ﬁnding indi-

cates a lack of consistency or alignment in sustain-

ability goals across different projects.

Ineffectiveness of Sustainability Integration. The

study identiﬁed a lack of a common goal for integrat-

ing sustainability. The primary focus is on delivering

a functional product, followed by customer satisfac-

tion, with sustainability often being a tertiary concern.

The absence of a shared goal poses a risk of failing to

measure and achieve sustainability objectives.

6.3 Improvements in the Software

Development Process

In general, each of the mentioned challenges presents

an opportunity for improvement in the alignment of

social sustainability in software development. By ad-

dressing these issues, we can enhance the integration

of sustainability principles into software development

practices. More speciﬁcally we discuss some of these

potential improvements here.

Deﬁning a software sustainability goal might im-

prove the software development process while ad-

dressing sustainability (Heldal et al., 2023)(Noman

et al., 2024). In this study, particularly in two student

groups, we noticed that when the customer clearly de-

ﬁned a software sustainability goal, the students were

able to translate sustainability issues into user stories

or functional requirements that targeted at SDG03-

Good Health and Well-being and SDG11-Sustainable

Cities and Communities, thereby contributing to the

social dimension of sustainability.

As a well-know topics in software requirement,

the customer expectation, communication alignment

and satisfaction towards the ﬁnal product is highly

discussed in this research ﬁeld (Huijgens et al.,

2017). It is in the software requirement phase of

software development process that sustainability con-

cerns emerged (Bambazek et al., 2023) (Condori-

Fernandez and Lago, 2018) (Duboc et al., 2019).

From this perspective, we realize that to create a so-

cially sustainable software product within the course,

it is essential to have proposals that address sustain-

ability concerns. Customers should consider time and

effort on putting the details on how their solution tar-

gets sustainability when they are proposing projects

for students’ development.

Bambazek et al. (2022) conducted a systematic

mapping and identiﬁed seven of 55 published papers

Exploring Social Sustainability Alignment in Software Development Projects

259

that proposed tools to integrate sustainability during

the software requirements. The authors also empha-

size the need for the availability of software tools

that practitioners can use to accelerate the adoption

of proposed approaches in practice (Bambazek et al.,

2023). On one hand, students must design solutions

that effectively address these issues. On the other

hand, the design of sustainability-oriented solutions

still requires supporting tools, approaches and prac-

tices to guide students in developing socially sustain-

able software products. A list of existing recom-

mended tools to address social sustainability is re-

ported in this study (de Souza et al., 2023).

Even though our study is identifying some actions

and connections that could explain a socially sustain-

able software product, there is still a need to further

investigate the effectiveness of those actions. There-

fore, incorporating indicators and metrics to evaluate

the social aspects of software can be a driver for im-

proving software development process in the adoption

of social sustainability actions (Venters et al., 2018)

(Al Hinai and Chitchyan, 2014).

7 LIMITATIONS AND FUTURE

WORK

The absence of a preliminary assessment of prior

knowledge about software sustainability and the long-

term impact of implementing any of these sustainabil-

ity goals are recognized vulnerability in the validity of

this study. This gap hampers the ability to deduce the

correlation between sustainability concerns and sus-

tainable development goal, as the degree of under-

standing remains unclear. This recognition highlights

the study’s self-awareness of its potential limitations.

Adopting selective and theoretical coding analy-

sis is one strategy to mitigate qualitative analysis bi-

ases. The involvement of two researchers in collab-

orative discussions to establish shared interpretations

of grounded theory data highlights the effort to mini-

mize bias and increase the reliability of results. This

highlights the study’s dedication to methodological

rigor and reliability.

Including sustainability in student projects can

prepare them for future careers and serve as a moti-

vational factor to contribute to social well-being, al-

though this aspect is not the focus of this study. Fu-

ture research opportunities lie in empirical investiga-

tion into motivational factors and the empirical val-

idation of sustainability integration in academic and

industrial settings.

8 CONCLUSION

As part of an engaged society that strives to achieve

the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, devel-

oping socially sustainable software can contribute to

addressing these goals and positively impacting our

society. Traditionally, software engineering courses

have predominantly focused on technical aspects.

However, history has taught us that human values,

principles, and behaviors are interconnected with the

technical aspects of software development and its uti-

lization. Therefore, it is essential to recognize that

sustainability, as another interdisciplinary ﬁeld, de-

serves attention.

In this context, social sustainability concepts be-

come practical tools for designing and developing

software to tackle social issues and threats. Our study

has revealed that introducing sustainability-related

questions can raise awareness, prompt discussions

about sustainability issues, and facilitate the creation

of socially sustainable software products.

Furthermore, we explored how aligning with so-

cial sustainability is a fundamental step to integrate

concerns into a project-based learning course. We

discussed the practical implications in terms of im-

provements in the software development process to

address social sustainability concerns within software

products. Students with a background in software en-

gineering can reﬂect on these issues and relate them

to sustainable development goals, thus making sus-

tainability more tangible within the realm of software

development.

In light of this agenda, there are still ample oppor-

tunities for enhancing and transforming our software

engineering curriculum to better prepare future gen-

erations by integrating sustainability topics.

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