Towards a Generic Sustainable Software Model

Since many years sustainability is becoming a challenging issue in software engineering domain. However till now, no clear nor exhaustive characterization was proposed to the concept of "sustainable software". Without it, sustainability remains an intangible ideal for software systems and consequently can't be assessed nor controlled nor enhanced. To cover this gap, we propose a Generic Sustainable Software Star Model (GS3M) that forms the basis towards a "complete" view of sustainable software. The model covers different sustainability dimensions: environmental, technical, social, individual and economic. For each dimension we define corresponding software sustainability values. To each value are associated software attributes promoting it. And each attribute can be composed of sub-attributes. To this last is associated a well defined metric.