Defining groups

A group has to be created and allotted to one or more of the five sustainability dimensions. Thus, the group assists requirement engineers in building the questionnaire and managing the requirements and stakeholders. For instance, if a group is allocated to the individual, social and economic sustainability dimensions, any stakeholder in this group will only answer relevant questions from the individual, social and economic sustainability aspects for each requirement assigned to this group. Assigning stakeholders and requirements to groups will reduce the number of questions. For instance, if there are 80 requirements and there is no group, a stakeholder has to answer 400 questions to rate all requirements (80 requirements ∗ 5 sustainability dimensions). However, if a stakeholder is assigned to a group having 10 related requirements and 2 related sustainability dimensions, they would need to answer only 20 questions. Requirement engineers should group stakeholders based on their role in the system and their areas of expertise.

In addition, they have to allocate requirements to related groups with regard to affected stakeholders and requirement ownership. For example, administrators and managers could be grouped and assigned to social and economic sustainability aspects while environmental experts can be grouped and allocated to the individual, social and environmental sustainability aspects. In the same way, administrative requirements can be assigned to administrators, managers and environmental experts groups.

5.1.2 Defining questions

To build a new questionnaire, five questions (instructions to rate a requirement with regard to a sustainability dimension) are generated automatically. Thus, for each requirement, k questions will be created, where 1 ≤ k ≤ 5. Each question should present a single sustainability dimension perspective, which is covered by the requirement. The generated instructions can be revised and refined by requirements engineers as well as sustainability experts. However, all the amendments must be completed before at least one stakeholder starts answering the questionnaire: if even one stakeholder begins responding to the questionnaire, the corresponding instructions for updating requests are immediately locked. All instructions have the following format:

‘Rate the influence of the requirement on the X sustainability’,

where X is replaced in a concrete case by the corresponding sustainability dimension: individual, social, technical, economic and environmental.

5.1.3 Defining requirements

Requirements engineers can create, export and/or import Comma Separated Values (CSV) files with the specifications of the high-level requirements, to assign them to created groups and to display them within a created questionnaire. The export and import feature allows the exchange of requirement specifications with other tools such as ReqMan and Rational DOORS. These tools

SECTION 5.1: FRAMEWORK FOR SUSTAINABILITY PROFILING

are using the standard format of CSV file. The CSV file should follow the Rational DOORS (Jazz-Platform 2017) prerequisite rules.

The first header row should contain artifact type, primary text, name, description and owner, where name is a requirement name, and primary text as the description of the requirement. An example of exported CSV file is:

ArtifactType, PrimaryText, Name, Description, Owner

5.1.4 Assigning stakeholders

After creating and assigning a group to one or more of the sustainability dimensions and require- ments, stakeholders can be allocated to the group. This allocation allows questions to be displayed and answered with regard to requirements of the selected sustainability dimensions.

SuSoftPro enables requirements engineers to create, export, and/or import stakeholder details. The details include a stakeholder’s name, email, and an allocated group that is assigned to one or more of the five sustainability dimensions. SuSoftPro generates an auto-sign-in and unique hyper-link for each of the stakeholder, permitting them to access and answer the questionnaire, which is customised for the corresponding group. The requirements engineers have the ability to update stakeholders’ details or delete them. The stakeholder list has a column to indicate the status of stakeholders, that is, waiting, in progress or submitted. If a stakeholder is allocated to a group to rate requirements, their status in the project will become waiting until they start answering the questionnaire. As soon as they start responding, their status will be updated to in progress until they finish and submit their questionnaire; then the status will be changed to submitted.

5.1.5 Rating requirements

Stakeholders can respond to a questionnaire when they receive an email with the corresponding access link. For each high-level requirement to be rated, the stakeholder can rate its influence on the sustainability dimensions using the interface presented on Figure 5.2, which shows how the FRS has been implemented. Each question includes

• Description of the requirement,

• Instruction to rate the requirement within the corresponding sustainability dimension,

• FRS to provide the rating.

The FRS is a form of trapezoidal fuzzy number from the two intervals as T ra(a, b, c, d), where 0 ≤ a ≤ b ≤ c ≤ d ≤ 1 (see, Section 2.4.1). The stakeholders have the ability to ignore any question that they cannot, or do not want to, answer if they are not familiar with the requirements or these are not related to them. The ignored question will not be included while generating the sustainability profile.

Figure 5.2: The developed fuzzy rating scale in SuSoftPro

The questionnaire displays the number of answered and ignored questions (i.e., the question that the stakeholder does not want to answer), as well as buttons to save the questionnaire for continuing at another time, for ignoring the question, and for moving between questions. Thus, each stakeholder answers allotted questions from varying views of certain sustainability dimensions by

1. Scaling a core response to be considered as fully compatible, and

2. Determining a support response to be considered as compatible to what extent.

The scale goes is 0 (critical value of sustainability) to 100% (green value). The two-level scales will prevent imprecision and error-proneness as per Lubiano et al. (2016). Finally, the stakeholder has to submit the questionnaire for analysis.

5.1.6 Analysing sustainability

The results of the rated requirements become inputs for the TOPSIS method (see, Section 2.4.2), which is applied twice as follows:

• First round: Apply sustainability dimensions as criteria to analyse each dimension within all requirements and overall sustainability rating for the software; and

• Second round: Apply requirements as criteria to determine overall sustainability within the statistical separation measures of requirements’ effect for each requirement.

The TOPSIS-based analysis is implemented as a dynamic feature: The calculations are (re)started as soon as any stakeholder submits the responses (and the status is labelled as submitted). The ignored questions within the response as well as any response currently having status waiting or in progressare not taken into account for the analysis.