SustainScrum: integrating sustainability assessment in a tailored Scrum process for computing quantitative sustainability indicators

Abstract In the wake of a rapidly growing global focus on sustainable practices, the year 2023 marked a significant regulatory milestone, with the enactment of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive. This directive significantly expands the scope of sustainability reporting, encompassing a broader array of enterprises, including large-scale, and small- and medium-sized enterprises within the EU. This regulatory development has profound implications for the software industry, as these companies need to provide comprehensive sustainability reporting for their software products. However, the industry still lacks models, tools, and methodologies for quantitatively assessing sustainability indicators during an agile software development process. In this paper, we introduce SustainScrum , a customized Scrum process model that incorporates sustainability evaluations into the development lifecycle of software products. More precisely, SustainScrum integrates the assessment of sustainability aspects into the backlog, user story management, and development stages of the Scrum process. Its primary objective is to ensure that sustainability considerations are systematically captured, evaluated, and addressed throughout the development process. It integrates the computation of quantitative sustainability indicators thereby advancing the ability to address sustainability challenges within software engineering practices. We performed an initial validation, investigating the applicability of SustainScrum on an open-source, publicly available requirements data set for agile development.