The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in Systems Engineering: Eliciting sustainability requirements

Abstract

This paper discusses a PhD research project testing the hypothesis that using the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals(SDG) as explicit inputs to drive the Software Requirements Engineering process will result in requirements with improved sustainability benefits. The research has adopted the Design Science Research Method (DSRM) [21] to test a process named SDG Assessment for Requirements Elicitation (SDGARE). Three DSRM cycles are being used to test the hypothesis in safety-critical, highprecision, software-intensive systems in aerospace and healthcare. Initial results from the first two DSRM cycles support the hypothesis. However, these cycles are in a plan-driven (waterfall) development context and future research agenda would be a similar application in an Agile development context.