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The Sustainability Assessment Framework Toolkit: A Decade of Modeling Experience

Patricia Lago, Nelly Condori Fernandez, Iffat Fatima, Markus Funke, Ivano Malavolta

TL;DR

The SAF Toolkit is a set of instruments developed to support software architects and design decision makers in modeling sustainability as a software quality property and is illustrated with examples that come from some of such studies.

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.

The Sustainability Assessment Framework Toolkit: A Decade of Modeling Experience

TL;DR

The SAF Toolkit is a set of instruments developed to support software architects and design decision makers in modeling sustainability as a software quality property and is illustrated with examples that come from some of such studies.

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.
Paper Structure (31 sections, 6 figures, 1 table)

This paper contains 31 sections, 6 figures, 1 table.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Background
  3. Definition of Software Sustainability
  4. The Dimension of "Sustainability Quality" (or Sustainability-Quality Dimension)
  5. The Dimension of "Time" (or Sustainability-Time Dimension)
  6. Key Performance Indicators
  7. Related Work
  8. The SAF Toolkit
  9. The Big Picture
  10. The SAF Toolkit: Where we are now
  11. Decision Map and its Instruments
  12. The Conceptual Elements
  13. The Decision Map
  14. The guiding Instruments
  15. Reflections
  16. ...and 16 more sections

Figures (6)

  • Figure 1: SAF Toolkit Overview. High-level overview of all involved instruments and their relation. Instruments inside the dashed-blue rectangle are available in its current version; instruments outside are plan of our future vision and have yet to be integrated. The figure builds upon the notation for Unified Modeling Language (UML) version 2.5.1 OMG-UML251.
  • Figure 2: DM visual notation and a simple example
  • Figure 3: Decision Maps. [See notation in Fig. \ref{['fig:DMnotationANDexample']}.(a).]
  • Figure 6: KPI Model. Detailed overview of the envisioned KPI model and its integration into the SAF Toolkit. The figure uses the notation for Unified Modeling Language (UML) version 2.5.1 OMG-UML251.
  • Figure 7: Software Architecture. Detailed overview of the Software Architecture ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010 Standard and its integration into the SAF Toolkit. The figure builds upon the notation for Unified Modeling Language (UML) version 2.5.1 OMG-UML251.
  • ...and 1 more figures