12. The Impact of Human Factors on Software Sustainability

Software engineering is a constantly evolving subject area that faces new challenges every day as it tries to automate newer business processes. One of the key challenges to the success of a software solution is attaining sustainability. The inability of numerous software to sustain for the desired time length is caused by limited consideration given to sustainability during the stages of software development. This chapter presents a detailed and inclusive study covering human factor-related challenges of and approaches to software sustainability. Sustainability can be achieved by conducting specific activities at the human, environmental, and economic level. Human factors include critical social activities such as leadership and communication. This chapter groups the existing research efforts based on the above aspects. Next, how those aspects affect software sustainability is studied via a survey of software practitioners. Based on the findings, it was observed that human sustainability aspects are important, and that taking one into consideration and ignoring the other factors will threaten the sustainability of software products. Despite the noteworthy advantages of making a software sustainable, the research community has presented only a limited number of approaches that contribute to improving the human factors to achieve sustainability. To the best of our knowledge, these representations require further research. In this regard, an organized, structured, and detailed study is required on existing human factor-related sustainability approaches which will serve as a one-stop-service for researchers and software engineers who are willing to learn about these.