Crowd Focused Semi-Automated Requirements Engineering for Evolution Towards Sustainability

Continuous requirements elicitation is an essential aspect of software product evolution to keep systems aligned with changing user needs. However, current requirements engineering approaches do not explicitly address sustainability in the evolution of systems. Reasons include a lack of awareness and a lack of shared understanding of the concept of sustainability in the RE community. Identifying and analysing the effects of requirements regarding sustainability is challenging as these effects can have an impact on multiple stakeholders and manifest themselves in one or more of the sustainability dimensions at different points in time. We argue that crowd-focused semi-automated requirements engineering allows the engagement of a range and a large number of stakeholders (including end-users and domain experts) in a continuous cycle of negotiation regarding potential effects of requirements on sustainability. Based on a motivational scenario, we introduce a platform for crowd-focused requirements engineering that supports the evolution towards sustainability in the future. We present our ongoing work and discuss early results for three key aspects of this platform to demonstrate how it can be utilised to improve the broader awareness and understanding of sustainability, not only for the involved crowd but also for researchers and society in general.