Navigating Sustainability and Legal Constraints in Software Engineering for the Battery Industry: A Research Agenda

More and more companies need to incorporate sustainability in requirements and integrate them into their business processes for various reasons. Following the dissemination of the Green Deal, the European Union is obliging companies to act more sustainably, since otherwise, sanctions and penalties may be imposed. Therefore, it is crucial for companies to cope with constraints stemming from legal regulations. Particularly in the resource-intensive battery industry, numerous legal constraints significantly impact software development and requirements engineering, as enterprise software must accurately implement regulated business processes. Due to the importance and novelty of this topic, there is not much knowledge available yet on how to realize that. This paper aims to get an overview of legal constraints in the context of sustainability by reporting the results of a systematic literature review. In the course of the study, 27 papers were identified in total and analyzed to derive a research agenda with four research avenues and associated questions. This study raises awareness of the need to consider legal constraints in the process of requirements engineering and conduct further research at the intersection of sustainability management and software engineering, especially in the context of the battery industry.