Towards an Architectural Perspective for Sustainability: Bundle the Needs from Industry

Abstract

Sustainability is increasingly recognized as an emerging quality property in software-intensive systems, yet architects lack structured guidance to address it effectively throughout the software design phase. Architectural perspectives-an architectural knowledge artifact composed of concerns, activities, tactics, pitfalls, and checklists-offer a promising approach to tackle such emerging quality properties across architectural views and are also independent of architecture frameworks and industry contexts. In this paper, we present a sustainability perspective vision, i.e., a revised notion of architectural perspective meant to be filled with its own elements to target sustainability concerns. We formulate our sustainability perspective vision through evidence from applying snowballing to seminal literature and from conducting a focus group with experts in the field. Our findings confirm the relevance of the different perspective elements in practice and highlight implications for shaping a sustainability perspective that meets industrial needs.