An Interview Study on Sustainability Concerns in Software Development Projects

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in research on sustainability in software engineering. Despite a quite active research on sustainability in software engineering, there is still a lack of understanding of how sustainability is perceived by software professionals. To understand how software sustainability is currently dealt with in practice, we performed an interview study with 10 software project team leads from 9 different companies in Austria. Our study shows that practitioners regard software sustainability as important but are very technically-minded with respect to sustainability. Organizational issues are addressed to a good degree but economic and environmental considerations are almost missing. The perceived influence of various project factors on sustainability is partly very diverse, suggesting that the meaning of sustainability needs to be refined for the concrete project and application context.