The world faces escalating crises: record-breaking temperatures, widespread fires, severe flooding, increased oceanic microplastics, and unequal resource distribution. Academia introduces courses around sustainability to meet the new demand, but software engineering education lags behind. While software systems contribute to environmental issues through high energy consumption, they also hold the potential for solutions, such as more efficient and equitable resource management. Yet, sustainability remains a low priority for many businesses, including those in the digital sector. Business as usual is no longer viable. A transformational change in software engineering education is urgently needed. We must move beyond traditional curriculum models and fully integrate sustainability into every aspect of software development. By embedding sustainability as a core competency, we can equip future engineers not only to minimise harm but also to innovate solutions that drive positive, sustainable change. Only with such a shift can software engineering education meet the demands of a world in crisis and prepare students to lead the next generation of sustainable technology. This article discusses a set of challenges and proposes a customisable education roadmap for integrating sustainability into the software engineering curricula. These challenges reflect our perspective on key considerations, stemming from regular, intensive discussions in regular workshops among the authors and the community, as well as our extensive research and teaching experience in the field.

To foster a sustainable society within a sustainable environment, we must dramatically reshape our work and consumption activities, most of which are facilitated through software. Yet, most software engineers hardly consider the effects on the sustainability of the IT products and services they deliver. This issue is exacerbated by a lack of methods and tools for this purpose. Despite the practical need for methods and tools that explicitly support consideration of the effects that IT products and services have on the sustainability of their intended environments, such methods and tools remain largely unavailable. Thus, urgent research is needed to understand how to design such tools for the IT community properly. In this article, we describe our experience using design science to create the Sustainability Awareness Framework (SusAF), which supports software engineers in anticipating and mitigating the potential sustainability effects during system development. More specifically, we identify and present the challenges faced during this process. The challenges that we have faced and addressed in the development of the SusAF are likely to be relevant to others who aim to create methods and tools to integrate sustainability analysis into their IT products and services development. Thus, the lessons learned in SusAF development are shared for the benefit of researchers and other professionals who design tools for that end.

Software can raise issues about ethics, power, politics, and values. We show how Critical Systems Heuristics can be used to structure explorations of early requirements and provide a framework for developing a reflective understanding for justifying the project and system scope.

In this paper, we propose when and how to perform sustainability assessment during software product and service inception, development, and evolution. We explain the challenge of right timings for sustainability assessments, how they are often delayed due to missing focus on values during the early development phases. We refer to a current solution, called SusAF, and discuss some of its challenges. We wrap up by advocating for a legal regulation supporting the actual implementation of sustainability assessments alike with how they are required in civil engineering.

In Dynamic Service Composition (DSC), an application can be dynamically composed using web services to achieve its functional and Quality of Services (QoS) goals. DSC is a relatively mature area of research that crosscuts autonomous and services computing. Complex autonomous and self-adaptive computing paradigms (e.g., multi-tenant cloud services, mobile/smart services, services discovery and composition in intelligent environments such as smart cities) have been leveraging DSC to dynamically and adaptively maintain the desired QoS, cost and to stabilize long-lived software systems. While DSC is fundamentally known to be an NP-hard problem, systematic attempts to analyze its scalability have been limited, if not absent, though such analysis is of a paramount importance for their effective, efficient, and stable operations.This article reports on a new application of goal-modeling, providing a systematic technique that can support DSC designers and architects in identifying DSC-relevant characteristics and metrics that can potentially affect the scalability goals of a system. The article then applies the technique to two different approaches for QoS-aware dynamic services composition, where the article describes two detailed exemplars that exemplify its application. The exemplars hope to provide researchers and practitioners with guidance and transferable knowledge in situations where the scalability analysis may not be straightforward. The contributions provide architects and designers for QoS-aware dynamic service composition with the fundamentals for assessing the scalability of their own solutions, along with goal models and a list of application domain characteristics and metrics that might be relevant to other solutions. Our experience has shown that the technique was able to identify in both exemplars application domain characteristics and metrics that had been overlooked in previous scalability analyses of these DSC, some of which indeed limited their scalability. It has also shown that the experiences and knowledge can be transferable: The first exemplar was used as an example to inform and ease the work of applying the technique in the second one, reducing the time to create the model, even for a non-expert.