Various fields of manufacturing, management, and business, including technology education, software development, and information communication technology (ICT), have espoused sustainability concepts. Including sustainability concepts in technology, education can help students learn how to implement the dimensions of sustainability (economic, social, and environmental). Lack of awareness and education regarding sustainability among students can impact their competence to incorporate sustainability into technology development. Thus, the development of student competence across the curriculum of technology education for sustainability is crucial. This research aims to explore student competence development in technology education (IT, computer science, and software development) through investigating their awareness of sustainability, and to investigate how much sustainability is infused across the technology education curriculum. The case study for this research is taken from a very populous and developing country—Pakistan. First, an in-depth survey of higher education students is conducted to investigate their awareness level of sustainability. Second, qualitative document analysis is conducted, where the standard curriculum for technology education is taken and analyzed for its provision towards sustainability. A total of 159 students from various public-sector universities of Pakistan reported their awareness towards sustainability. The results show that 71% of them are unaware of the term sustainability in their respective fields, only 17% students know the basic definition of sustainability, and 12% of students have just an idea of how sustainability is related to technology education. It is also observed that the current curriculum of technology education does not sufficiently cover specific subjects or topics that can help students understand the concepts of sustainability. This study highlights the gaps in the offered curriculum for building the desired competence of students in technology education.

Software crowdsourcing (SW CS) is an evolving software development paradigm, in which crowds of people are asked to solve various problems through an open call (with the encouragement of prizes for the top solutions). Because of its dynamic nature, SW CS has been progressively accepted and adopted in the software industry. However, issues pertinent to the understanding of requirements among crowds of people and requirements engineers are yet to be clarified and explained. If the requirements are not clear to the development team, it has a significant effect on the quality of the software product. This study aims to identify the potential challenges faced by requirements engineers when conducting the SW–CS based requirements engineering (RE) process. Moreover, solutions to overcome these challenges are also identified. Qualitative data analysis is performed on the interview data collected from software industry professionals. Consequently, 20 SW–CS based RE challenges and their subsequent proposed solutions are devised, which are further grouped under seven categories. This study is beneficial for academicians, researchers and practitioners by providing detailed SW–CS based RE challenges and subsequent solutions that could eventually guide them to understand and effectively implement RE in SW CS.

Inevitably time has come that necessitate for software systems to have long lasting social impact and environmental friendliness. Although, sustainability aspects related to environmental and social have been well versed in literature, however software sustainability, for the way of development and as final product for use, is still not mature enough. With the increasing role of software crowdsourcing, a new working architecture for software development, in global software development (GSD) settings has emerged challenges regarding sustainable software development and software sustainability which are still to be elucidated. Though software standards and models exist to assist co-located and global software development, however seismic changes in the working architecture of software development as software crowdsourcing are highlighting a risk of software failure. Recently, statistics showed that only 30% of projects are successful, whereas 50% encounter with challenges and the remaining 20% are absolute failures that implicate a challenge towards software success and its sustainability. This posits questions of how many IEEE and international standard organization (ISO) standards exist that cover the sustainability aspects in particular to software development and how in-depth the development practices are addressing sustainable aspects in software crowdsourcing? Thus, aim of this paper is to examine the IEEE software standards with lens of sustainability to software crowdsourcing. After reviewing the existing IEEE standards related to sustainability, it has been observed that few standards exist which have discussed the importance of sustainability on an abstract level (energy and examining environmental influence by the computers) in software development. Moreover, standards are focusing less attention towards the sustainability of software development in the presence of new envision towards software crowdsourcing. Thus, lack of any guideline towards sustainable software crowdsourcing (SSC) is highlighted as one of the limitations in the software standards. This study contributes to the GSD industry in two folds, first by laying down the importance and theoretical association on and around for sustainable crowdsourcing, secondly by highlighting IEEE standards inadequacy towards the suppressing phenomena of sustainability in software crowdsourcing, if addressed adequately can minimize the ripple effect towards software failure.

With the utilization of crowdsourcing as a problem-solving approach, software industry has progressed tremendously in recent few years. It is a powerful approach which supports distributed human intelligence to solve complex problems in the field of software development, machine learning, linguistics, medical, interpretation and other considerable fields of study. Different models of crowdsourcing have been used depending on the nature of required outcome of the task, and have had varying levels of success to date. Microtasking is one of the lucrative models of crowdsourcing which penetrated the problem-solving strategy by facilitating the decomposition of complex tasks into short and self-contained microtasks which can be performed in few minutes. Regardless of considerable number of studies explored the kinds of microtasks, existing researches fall short when it comes to technical as well as non-technical tasks and the categorization of relevant microtasks. Thus, the aim of this research is to understand the context of microtasked related crowdsourcing and to explore the microtasks related to crowdsourced software development which exist in literature. Systematic literature review is conducted to identify the microtasking activities and expert review is conducted to validate the identified microtasking activities and their categories. The final publication sample to review the literature is composed of 42 research articles and the reviews of 4 experts are taken for validation. A total of 72 microtasking activities are found along with 11 categories. After validation applied, researchers came up with a list of 61 unique microtasking activities. This paper contributes to software industry by providing list of microtasks along with their categories which will be fruitful for researchers, microtasking platforms and their clients. It contributes to software industry by providing list of microtasks which will be fruitful for researchers and microtasking platforms.

Software Engineering is a discipline that provides a systematic approach to develop software in a cost-effective manner. Successful software development is challenged by various challenges, such as varying situational contexts, conformity with standards, changing requirements, optimism of schedule, schedule pressure, software complexity, and software invisibility. Varying situational contexts are the changed circumstances that are resulted due to varying situational factors. These situational factors are the root cause of varying situations, which need to be discovered in detail. If these situational factors are left unattended, they can cause software failures. Software standards can help to deal with software failures. In this paper, we have reviewed various software engineering standards from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Standard Association. These software engineering standards were investigated for the factors and sub-factors that can lead to varying situations among software development team members. As a result we found 12 factors grouped with 52 sub-factors that can lead to varying situations among software development team members. These resulted factors and sub-factors can act as a source for varying situations among team members. Unattended identified situational factors can lead to software failures. This paper provides a guideline for the practitioners to consider these factors and sub-factors while performing software development in order to have a successful software development.