Goal Modeling for Sustainability and Human Values

Abstract

Human Values and Sustainability have emerged as concerns of central relevance. While high-profile value breaches have led to financial or reputational losses for companies like Delta Air Lines, Facebook, and Volkswagen, human values - such as transparency, fairness, and responsibility - are heavily underrepresented in software engineering methods. Sustainability, as a wicked problem, poses challenges to business-as-usual in many areas, including that of software and systems modeling. In this talk, I briefly present key challenges for human values and sustainability before introducing goal modeling as a means to capture and reason about the intentions of stakeholders who care about human values and sustainability. I then report on recent efforts to (i) improve the reusability of goal models so that goal models can be evaluated in a reuse hierarchy with other software engineering models, (ii) improve the evaluation of evolving goal models by explicitly defining changes to a goal model over time, and (iii) reason about the effectiveness of human development in complement with a technical efficiency assessment using human time as the unit of measure for sustainable technological development.