Integrating Sustainability into Scrum Agile Software Development: An Action Research Approach

Abstract

Software plays a crucial role in promoting sustainability, yet there is no standardized approach for embedding sustainability into Scrum agile software development process. With many systems now built using agile methods, integrating sustainability into these practices is essential. This paper presents an action research conducted with an industry partner to demonstrate how sustainability concerns can be incorporated into the Scrum agile framework using previously published sustainability elicitation techniques (e.g., we used the Sustainability Awareness Framework for this action research). The goal of this study is to guide software development practitioners in making sustainability-conscious design and development decisions. Our findings show that even practitioners with limited prior sustainability knowledge, were able to successfully adapt their agile processes to integrate systematic treatment of sustainability concerns.