Sustainability Flags for the Identification of Sustainability Posts in Q&A Platforms

TL;DR

This paper introduces sustainability flags as a new tool to identify sustainability-related discussions in online cloud architecture forums, improving classification accuracy and user understanding.

Contribution

It proposes the concept of sustainability flags based on best practices and evaluates their effectiveness through controlled experiments.

Findings

Flags lead to fewer, more certain classifications.

Flags improve performance in identifying sustainability posts.

Users find flags more useful and understandable.

Abstract

In recent years, sustainability in software systems has gained significant attention, especially with the rise of cloud computing and the shift towards cloud-based architectures. This shift has intensified the need to identify sustainability in architectural discussions to take informed architectural decisions. One source to see these decisions is in online Q&A forums among practitioners' discussions. However, recognizing sustainability concepts within software practitioners' discussions remains challenging due to the lack of clear and distinct guidelines for this task. To address this issue, we introduce the notion of sustainability flags as pointers in relevant discussions, developed through thematic analysis of multiple sustainability best practices from cloud providers. This study further evaluates the effectiveness of these flags in identifying sustainability within cloud architecture posts, using a controlled experiment. Preliminary results suggest that the use of flags results in classifying fewer posts as sustainability-related compared to a control group, with moderately higher certainty and significantly improved performance. Moreover, sustainability flags are perceived as more useful and understandable than relying solely on definitions for identifying sustainability.