Sustainability is Stratified: Toward a Better Theory of Sustainable Software Engineering
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Sustainable software engineering (SSE) means creating software in a way that meets present needs without undermining our collective capacity to meet our future needs. It is typically conceptualized as several intersecting dimensions or “pillars”-environmental, social, economic, technical and in-dividual. However; these pillars are theoretically underdeveloped and require refinement. Objectives: The objective of this paper is to generate a better theory of SSE. Method: First, a scoping review was conducted to understand the state of research on SSE and identify existing models thereof. Next, a meta-synthesis of qualitative research on SSE was conducted to critique and improve the existing models identified. Results: 961 potentially relevant articles were extracted from five article databases. These articles were de-duplicated and then screened independently by two screeners, leaving 243 articles to examine. Of these, 109 were non-empirical, the most common empirical method was systematic review, and no randomized controlled experiments were found. Most papers focus on ecological sustainability (158) and the sustainability of software products (148) rather than processes. A meta-synthesis of 36 qualitative studies produced several key propositions, most notably, that sustainability is stratified (has different meanings at different levels of abstraction) and multisystemic (emerges from interactions among multiple social, technical, and sociotechnical systems). Conclusion: The academic literature on SSE is surprisingly non-empirical. More empirical evaluations of specific sustainability interventions are needed. The sustainability of software development products and processes should be conceptualized as multisystemic and stratified, and assessed accordingly.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".