The Sustainability Assessment Framework Toolkit: A Decade of Modeling Experience

TL;DR

This paper introduces the SAF Toolkit, a set of tools developed over ten years to help software architects model and measure sustainability as a key quality attribute in software systems.

Contribution

The paper presents the SAF Toolkit, a comprehensive framework for modeling and assessing sustainability in software architecture, based on extensive industrial experience.

Findings

Validated through multiple industrial case studies

Provides practical instruments for sustainability modeling

Lays groundwork for future extensions in architecture measurement

Abstract

Software intensive systems play a crucial role in most, if not all, aspects of modern society. As such, both their sustainability and their role in supporting sustainable processes, must be realized by design. To this aim, the architecture of software intensive systems should be designed to support sustainability goals; and measured to understand how effectively they do so. In this paper, we present the Sustainability Assessment Framework (SAF) Toolkit -- a set of instruments we developed to support software architects and design decision makers in modeling sustainability as a software quality property. The SAF Toolkit is the result of our experience gained in over a decade of cases in collaboration with industrial partners. We illustrate the toolkit with examples stemming from various cases. We extract our lessons learned, and our current research and future plans to extend the SAF Toolkit for further architecture modeling and measurement.