Software Sustainability: A Design Case for Achieving Sustainable Pension Services in Developing Country

TL;DR

This paper investigates software sustainability awareness in Nigeria's pension industry, highlighting challenges and proposing strategies to enhance sustainable software design practices among practitioners.

Contribution

It provides insights into the specific challenges faced by pension software developers in Nigeria and offers mitigation strategies to promote sustainability awareness in developing countries.

Findings

Practitioners lack awareness of sustainable software design.

Proper sustainability knowledge can improve pension service efficiency.

Challenges include limited awareness and industry-specific barriers.

Abstract

The need for efficient and sustainable software to improve business and achieve goals cannot be over-emphasized. Sustainable digital services and product delivery cannot be achieved without embracing sustainable software design practices. Despite the current research progress on software sustainability, most software development practitioners in developing countries are unclear about what constitutes software sustainability and often lack the proper understanding of how to implement it in their specific industry domain. Research efforts from software engineering focused on promoting software sustainability awareness in developed countries, and fewer efforts have been channeled to studying the same awareness in developing countries. This has affected the level of awareness about sustainable software design practices in most developing countries. This research investigates the awareness of software sustainability in the Nigerian pension industry and its challenges among practitioners. The software development practitioners were engaged and interviewed. We offered ways to mitigate the identified challenges and promote the awareness of software sustainability in the pension industry. Our findings further show that, with the right sustainability knowledge, the software practitioners in the pension industry have the potential to support their organization's sustainable culture and improve the efficiency of product design and service delivery.