A Review of Software Architecture Evaluation Methods for Sustainability Assessment | IEEE Conference Publication | IEEE Xplore

A Review of Software Architecture Evaluation Methods for Sustainability Assessment


Abstract:

Building sustainability-aware software requires addressing sustainability early in the software development life-cycle. It can be ensured through Software Architecture (S...Show More

Abstract:

Building sustainability-aware software requires addressing sustainability early in the software development life-cycle. It can be ensured through Software Architecture (SA) evaluation for conformance to sustainability requirements. Typically, software sustainability needs to be assessed across four dimensions (4D): economic, environmental, social and technical. The current literature lacks information about 4D-sustainability awareness of SA evaluation methods. In this paper, we present a systematic literature review to identify, categorize and characterize SA evaluation methods from 71 primary studies to ascertain their applicability for 4D-sustainability evaluation. Our results show that the majority of the methods are scenario-based, and provide support for technical sustainability but lack 4D-sustainability coverage. We conclude that extending the steps of an existing method for sustainability combined with metric-based modeling of 4D-sustainability QAs can aid in 4D-sustainability-aware SA evaluation. Also, continuous SA evaluation needs to be explored for the sustainability of SA over time.
Date of Conference: 13-17 March 2023
Date Added to IEEE Xplore: 24 April 2023
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Conference Location: L'Aquila, Italy

I. Introduction

Software-based digital solutions have become ubiquitous in our society, hence creating a need for developing software systems that meet the quality requirements of the relevant stakeholders. With the growing nature of such digital ecosystems, the need to include sustainability as a software quality has become imperative. Penzenstadler et al. [13] define software sustainability as "preserving the function of a system over a defined time span". Lago et al. [10] further describe sustainability as a property of software quality under four dimensions (4D): Economic (Ec), Environmental (E), Social (S) and Technical (T). To fulfill the sustainability quality requirements, the quality of software needs to be assessed (over a period of time) across 4D sustainability dimensions.

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