Prof. Stefanie Betz

Stefanie Betz is a Professor in socio-informatics at Furtwangen University, Germany. Before, she was a junior research group leader at Karlsruhe Institute for Technology, Germany and a senior researcher at Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden. Her research focuses on the interdependences between societies and software systems. She examines how software practitioners can develop an “impact perspective” instead of an “orientation perspective”. Overall, Dr. Betz argues that the critical role that software plays in society demands a paradigm shift in the mindset of Software Engineering. She is the author of several publications on societies and software engineering and one of the co-authors of the Karlskrona Manifesto for Sustainability Design (www.sustainabilitydesign.org). Her research has been published in high-impact conferences and journals, such as Communications of the ACM, Journal of Software and Systems, IEEE Software, International Conference on Requirements Engineering and the International Conference on Software Engineering.

Synopsis

Going beyond the SDGs

UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) are important and focus on systems which have sustainability in mind. While people agree that SDGs are well established, they often neglect that ordinary software systems also have an effect on sustainability. 

We, as software engineers and anyone working in IT product design, should go beyond the 17 SDG and come up with methods and tools to support the analysis of effects for any software system on sustainability while designing and evolving them.