Cross-level interaction and reinforcement of sustainability problems

Determine how sustainability problems arising across organizational, process, and product levels of software development connect and reinforce one another across multiple sustainability dimensions.

Background

The paper introduces sustainability anti-patterns as recurring socio-technical configurations in which organizational priorities, development practices, and technical decisions interact to produce long-term unsustainable outcomes. It argues that existing sustainability research is fragmented across dimensions and socio-technical levels, leaving the systemic relationships among these problems insufficiently understood.

The authors identify systematic synthesis of existing literature, systems-thinking methods, and direct empirical investigations—such as practitioner interviews and repository mining—as possible means of studying these cross-level relationships. The unresolved issue is how apparently separate sustainability concerns connect and amplify one another in practice.