Integrating sustainability into agile requirements engineering : a design science study of AI-assisted user stories and sustainability-related effort tracking

Abstract

The software industry is growing rapidly, which makes sustainability an important concern in software development. Sustainability needs to be considered early because decisions made during requirements engineering affect later design and development work. In Agile software development, teams use user stories to describe product functions. Therefore, adding sustainability requirements directly to user stories can help teams consider sustainability from the beginning. However, many organisations have sustainability goals, but these goals are not easily translated into daily Agile work. In addition, teams may work on sustainability, but companies often have no clear way to track or compare this effort. This thesis addresses these gaps by designing an AI-supported tool that helps teams create sustainability-aware user stories and make sustainability-related development effort visible. The study followed a Design Science Research approach with one Finnish software company and included seven iterative cycles. Data were collected through interviews, analysis of Jira user stories, workshops, surveys, and prototype development. The results showed that directly adding sustainability to vague user stories could produce generic or irrelevant AI suggestions. A better approach was to first check the quality of a user story, then restructure it using the INVEST framework, and finally embed sustainability. This approach produced more relevant and useful results. The thesis also introduces sustainability story points to estimate sustainability-related developer effort separately from normal story points, supported by a dashboard for visualising effort across teams. The study provides a preliminary tool and design approach for connecting sustainability goals with Agile requirements work.