Sustainability and Longevity: Two sides of the same quality?
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This document discusses sustainability and longevity in information systems design. It argues that sustainability and longevity are two sides of the same quality concern. The document outlines an agenda to discuss digital preservation, curation, and how requirements engineering can help address sustainability as a shared concern. It proposes several research questions around quality models and tradeoffs, cultural and practice barriers, and how to systematically consider sustainability in the requirements process.
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Sustainability and Longevity: Two sides of the same quality?
- 1. Sustainability and Longevity: Two sides of the same quality CHRISTOPH BECKER RE4SUSY 2014 1 ? The paper to this talk is available at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1216
- 2. 2 sustainability RE SE Information Systems Design Digital Curation Longevity Systems sustaina bility
- 3. Agenda Digital preservation Digital curation Sustainability or longevity? Observations and implications Research questions A manifesto? 3
- 4. 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?
- 5. 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/
- 6. text.odt text.docx text.pdf Digital artefacts are not sustainable on their own… 6 text.docx text.pdf Acrobat 10 Hello Christoph, you have 10 minutes left… Different editor, same file Hello Christoph, you have 8.9 minutes left… Different editor, different file Hello Christoph, you have ERROR! FIELD UNDEFINED minutes left… Acrobat 10 Hello Christoph, you have 9.4 minutes left… 1110101110110101101110101011101010101100100110101011
- 7. Experimentation Theory Computation and Simulation Data Mining Sustainable Infrastructure 7 data science data curation
- 8. Good data wanted… 8 data science data curation
- 9. 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”)
- 11. 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 11 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
- 12. 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! 12 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
- 13. 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 13
- 14. 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 14
- 15. Sustainability as shared concern 15
- 16. 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 16
- 17. 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? 17
- 18. 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? 18 1 T. Kuny, “The digital dark ages? challenges in the preservation of electronic information,” International preservation news, no. 17, p. 813, 1998.
- 19. 19 reference point wanted RE SE Information Systems Design Digital Curation Longevity Systems sustaina bility
- 20. 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