Sustainability in Software Architecture: A Systematic Mapping Study

TL;DR

This systematic mapping study reviews the current state of sustainability in software architecture, highlighting research gaps and proposing a future agenda to address the multi-faceted nature of sustainability in this field.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive overview of sustainability-focused research in software architecture and identifies key gaps and needs for future work.

Findings

Research is disproportionately focused on technical aspects.

Holistic perspectives on sustainability are underrepresented.

More reflection-oriented and lifecycle coverage studies are needed.

Abstract

Sustainability is an increasingly-studied topic in software engineering in general, and in software architecture in particular. There are already a number of secondary studies addressing sustainability in software engineering, but no such study focusing explicitly on software architecture. This work aims to fill this gap by conducting a systematic mapping study on the intersection between sustainability and software architecture research with the intention of (i) reflecting on the current state of the art, and (ii) identifying the needs for further research. Our results show that, overall, existing works have focused disproportionately on specific aspects of sustainability, and in particular on the most technical and "inward facing" ones. This comes at the expense of the holistic perspective required to address a multi-faceted concern such as sustainability. Furthermore, more reflection-oriented research works, and better coverage of the activities in the architecting life cycle are required to further the maturity of the area. Based on our findings we then propose a research agenda for sustainability-aware software architecture.