Sustainability Education in Software Engineering: Experiences from Requirement Engineering Curriculum

Abstract

The current software engineering workforce lacks an understanding of ways to tackle the different sustainability impacts of software solutions on users, society, and the environment. As a result, higher educational institutions are tasked with providing courses for training the current workforce and educating students, who are future software development practitioners, to have sustainability awareness and competency. However, there are few concrete sustainability guidelines and examples, specifically in requirement engineering, to guide software engineering students in higher educational institutions to evaluate the sustainability impacts of software systems and services. This paper reports the results of applying collaborative learning methods with a sustainability awareness framework and goal model to educate first-year software engineering master’s students in a requirement engineering course at LUT University, Finland. The requirement engineering course focuses on creating sustainability awareness among students and improving their competencies to become sustainability advocates in software engineering projects. The results detail the evolution of the requirements engineering course content and structure from 2020 to 2022 with a focus on the teaching methods, course content, student feedback, and lessons learned.