Requirements Engineering Knowledge as a Foundation for a Sustainability-Aware Scrum Framework

Sustainability has become a widely discussed topic in software engineering. Several requirements engineering approaches have already been proposed that deal with the question of how impacts of requirements on sustainability dimensions can be identified and managed. However, in contrast to requirements engineering, little is known about how to identify potential sustainability effects of software systems in agile software development and how to foster the agile development of sustainable software. The goal of our research is to investigate how sustainability can be incorporated into Scrum. Our ongoing work targets the development of a Sustainability-Aware Scrum Framework that integrates requirements engineering knowledge into Scrum to raise the awareness of sustainability impacts of software systems and to make software systems more sustainable. The main contribution of our work is a set of recommendations on how the Scrum framework, as the major agile development process, can be extended towards sustainability. Furthermore, we discuss an evaluation plan, present a prototype of a software tool that supports tracking possible sustainability impacts of user stories, and provide preliminary results.