A GQM-Based Method to Support Elicitation of Sustainability Requirements for Mobile Applications

The demand to develop sustainable mobile applications is getting higher to meet the fast changing mobile technology. Eliciting the right sustainability requirements has been identified as one of the major tasks to produce sustainable and green mobile applications. However, the elicitation process is very challenging because sustainability is not treated and considered as a first-class quality like other quality attributes such as safety and security. In recent studies, several methods have been developed to achieve sustainability in software. However, there is still lack of approaches in the area of software engineering that can be used to elicit the sustainability requirements for green mobile applications. To design a sustainable and energy-efficient mobile application that will give a positive impact on productivity, it is necessary to carefully elicit and specify sustainability requirements. This research aims to provide a method to elicit sustainability requirements towards green mobile application design based on Goal Question Metric (GQM) approach. A case example has been used to validate the feasibility of the proposed elicitation method. The case example reveals that it is feasible for software engineers to apply this approach for eliciting sustainability requirements for native, hybrid and web application.