Towards a Taxonomy of Sustainability Requirements for Software Design

Software systems are a significant contributor to global sustainability concerns, demanding that environmental, social, technical, and economic factors be systematically addressed from the initial requirements engineering phase. Although existing research provides various sustainability requirements (SRs), these contributions are often fragmented, specific to certain dimensions, or limited to particular application domains, resulting in a critical lack of a unified, comprehensive taxonomy for the software engineering community. To address this gap, this research conducts a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to extract and organize sustainability requirements from the state-of-the-art. The primary contribution is a comprehensive taxonomy of SRs across the four dimensions of sustainability (environmental, technical, social, and economic). For each identified category, we provide clear definitions, associated metrics, and measures. Furthermore, we depict a correlation matrix that projects the positive and negative influences (synergies and conflicts) among categories across different dimensions. This systematized reference assists both software developers and researchers in effectively formulating, managing, and reconciling trade-offs within sustainable software development.