Towards a Sustainability-aware Software Architecture Evaluation for Cloud-Based Software Services

The ubiquity of digital solutions integrating cloud-based software services necessitates sustainability awareness of such solutions. The integration of sustainability needs evaluation early in the software development life-cycle; preferably at the software architecture level. Although extensive literature is available for software architecture evaluation, not so much is observed for sustainability awareness, in general, and specifically for cloud-based software service architectures. In this study, we aim to create a blueprint of a software architecture evaluation method that has the potential to guide the sustainability-aware software architecture evaluation of cloud-based software services. We use the knowledge extracted from existing software architecture evaluation methods from our previous work and identify the steps to develop a generic blueprint for software architecture evaluation. Our blueprint of software architecture evaluation methods consists of 11 general steps divided into 3 phases. We discuss the challenges of software architecture evaluation and provide recommendations; in general and in the context of sustainability. We further present additional sub-steps that supplement the software architecture evaluation blueprint with a sustainability-focused trade-off analysis, impact analysis and prioritization. The software architecture evaluation blueprint can be used and customized for the evaluation of cloud-based software service architectures based on cloud-based software service-specific evaluation criteria (quality attributes/metrics) for sustainability awareness. Future work involves identifying sustainability metrics and evaluating the blueprint in an industrial setting for cloud-based software services.