Software Sustainability: Beyond the Tower of Babel

Principally associated with the field of ecology, the topic of sustainability has emerged as an increasingly important area of research in a number of sub-fields within the domain of computing including artificial intelligence, high-performance computing, human-computer interaction, requirements engineering, and scientific computing [9]. Within the field of software engineering, sustainability has been identified as an important topic given modern society's high dependency on increasingly complex and ‘dangerously fragile’ software systems, which operate in evolving, distributed eco-systems [17].