The Blind Men and the Elephant: Towards a Software Sustainability Architectural Evaluation Framework

Software sustainability has been identified as one of the key challenges in the development of scientific and engineering software as we move towards new paradigms of research and computing infrastructures. However, it is suggested that sustainability is not well understood within the software engineering community and traditional software engineering methods do not support software sustainability, which can led to ineffective and inefficient efforts to address the concept or result in its complete omission from the software system. This paper considers how software sustainability can be addressed in the design and engineering process of software systems. The paper proposes that in order to achieve software sustainability it must be considered a composite, non-functional requirement, which can be reasoned over at an architectural level by building and evaluating appropriate architectural models.