Sustainability and Longevity:

Two sides of the same

quality CHRISTOPH BECKER

RE4SUSY 2014

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? The paper to this talk is available at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1216

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sustainability

RE

SE

Information Systems Design

Digital Curation

Longevity

Systems sustaina

bility

Agenda

Digital preservation

Digital curation

Sustainability or longevity?

Observations and implications

Research questions

A manifesto?

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Digital preservation as communication

… But at the time of reception

• there is no message m any more

• there may be no sender (any more)

• there may be no encoder to check against

• there may be no decoder

• the recipient may not be the original addressee

...

Message m

encode

Digital object

Digital object

Message n

perform

preserve, i.e. transmit through time (may require transformation)

Is n authentic?

The Domesday book

Jeffrey Darlington, Andy Finney, Adrian Pearce. Domesday Redux: The Rescue of the BBC Domesday Project Videodiscs.

July 2003, Ariadne Issue 36 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/tna/

text.odt

text.docx

text.pdf

Digital artefacts are not

sustainable on their own…

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Experimentation

Theory

Computation and Simulation

Data Mining

Sustainable

Infrastructure

7 data

science data curation

Good data wanted… 8

data

science data curation

digital

curation?

Latin cūrō: I arrange, see to, attend to, take care of, ensure; I

heal, cure; I govern, command; I undertake, procure…. from

ProtoIndoEuropean *kʷeis (“to heed”)

what is long-term?

Sustainable economics

1. The demand for digital preservation is a derived

demand.

2. Digital materials are depreciable durable assets.

3. Digital assets are non-rival in consumption and

create a free-rider potential.

4. The digital preservation process is temporally dynamic and path-dependent.

Misalignment of demand

Market failure

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Sustainable Economics for a Digital Planet: Ensuring Long-Term Access to Digital Information. Final Report of the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access, February 2010. http://brtf.sdsc.edu/publications.html

Information Systems

longevity

From preservation to longevity … to Information Systems

Longevity as a design concern1

1. Information longevity: decouple information from system

2. The ”ability to sustain the information system …” - system evolution plus system resilience

3. … and exit point

Cf. relative sustainability: “preserving the function of a

system over a defined time span”2 !

SE practice: Lack of long-term thinking

Social, technical, environmental, economic!

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1 Proenca et al (2013) Longevity as an Information Systems Design Concern. CAISE Forum 2 Penzenstadler (2013). “Towards a definition of sustainability in and for software engineering,” ACM SAC

Implications

Start with sustainability (or longevity) as a concern rather

than a system quality

Role of information for understanding sustainability

Sustainability is more than lean software plus features to

support environmental sustainability!

Do not separate “susy of” and “susy for”

A question of legitimacy

An opportunity

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The role of RE in susy

Many techniques exist

elastic reconfiguration for cloud computing

Standard RE plus sustainability

SW evolution, SW resilience

SW architecture analysis and tradeoff

Digital preservation

….

But: Lack of consideration, of unified perspective

Requirements engineering

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Sustainability as shared

concern

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Research questions

Stakeholder misalignment (temporal/social/…)

Understanding digital ecosystems

The environmental impact of long-term preservation

vs. its role for social, environmental… sustainability

Holistic modelling perspectives

Trade-off decisions on sustainability dimensions

Information longevity and system sustainability

Quality relationships

End-of-life considerations

Requirements patterns

Practice

Culture

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RQ: Quality models and

decisions

Trade-offs between sustainability dimensions

Can early-phase models support robust design decisions considering these trade-offs?

Do current viewpoints provide adequate support for decision making in sustainability?

How can we anticipate likely changes of desired system quality with critical impact early? How to assess quality requirements over time?

Where does information longevity go beyond SQUARE data quality?

Under which circumstances should end-of-life concerns be considered?

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Culture and practice

“The real problem is not technological… What we

don’t have yet in our digital culture is the habit of

long-term thinking that supports preservation.” 1

What are the inhibitors? Can RE contribute to an

increased awareness of the importance and

benefits?

What are the cultural factors that influence the

perception of relevance of sustainability in

organizations?

Can a systematic approach towards analyzing and

documenting these in an RE process increase the

effective consideration of sustainability concerns?

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1 T. Kuny, “The digital dark ages? challenges in the preservation of electronic information,” International preservation news, no. 17, p. 813, 1998.

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reference point

wanted

RE

SE

Information Systems Design

Digital Curation

Longevity

Systems sustaina

bility

20

Sustainability and Longevity:

Two sides of the same quality Christoph Becker, re4susy 2014 ?

‘the real-world arguments for short-term optimization are likely to continue to

prevail unless significant external and internal efforts are made to address some of

the long-term needs.” P. G. Neumann, “The foresight saga, redux,” Commun. ACM, vol. 55, no. 10, p. 2629, Oct. 2012 The paper to this talk is openly available at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1216