Using Sustainability Impact Scores for Software Architecture Evaluation

2025-01-28

AI Summary

Current software design lacks systematic methods to assess conflicts between environmental requirements and quality attributes, as well as their broader sustainability implications. This paper proposes the Sustainability Impact Scoring (SIS) method at the architectural level: it is the first approach to systematically map environmental, social, and economic sustainability impacts onto the software quality attribute trade-off space; introduces a dynamic priority-weighting mechanism grounded in risk and stakeholder importance to enable quantified, cross-dimensional comparability of sustainability impacts; and integrates quality attribute analysis, risk-driven modeling, and a multi-model decision-making framework. Evaluated in an industrial energy-sector case study, SIS effectively identifies latent sustainability impacts of technical quality decisions, supports early preventive governance, enhances regulatory compliance, and strengthens strategic alignment with sustainability objectives.

Technology Category

• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Satisfiability
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Search and Optimization: Evaluation and Analysis

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Sustainability and carbon-aware systems for Web, mobile, and WoT
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• Responsible Web: Sustainability and climate impact of web technologies

Abstract

For future regulatory compliance, organizations must assess and report on the state of sustainability in terms of its impacts over time. Sustainability, being a multidimensional concern, is complex to quantify. This complexity further increases with the interdependencies of the quality concerns across different sustainability dimensions. The research literature lacks a holistic way to evaluate sustainability at the software architecture level. With this study, our aim is to identify quality attribute (QA) trade-offs at the software architecture level and quantify the related sustainability impact. To this aim we present an improved version of the Sustainability Impact Score (SIS), building on our previous work. The SIS facilitates the identification and quantification of trade-offs in terms of their sustainability impact, leveraging a risk- and importance-based prioritization mechanism. To evaluate our approach, we apply it to an industrial case study involving a multi-model framework for integrated decision-making in the energy sector. Our study reveals that technical quality concerns have significant, often unrecognized impacts across sustainability dimensions. The SIS coupled with QA trade-offs can help practitioners make informed decisions that align with their sustainability goals. Early evaluations can help organizations mitigate sustainability risks by taking preventive actions.

Problem

• Environmental considerations
• Software design
• Quality requirement conflicts

Innovation

• Improved Environmental Scoring System
• Conflict Prioritization
• Early Assessment in Software Design