=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-3921/poster-paper1
|storemode=property
|title=Towards an Architectural Perspective for Sustainability
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3921/poster-paper1.pdf
|volume=Vol-3921
|authors=Markus Funke,Patricia Lago
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/icsob/FunkeL24
}}
==Towards an Architectural Perspective for Sustainability==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3921/poster-paper1.pdf
Towards an Architectural Perspective for Sustainability
Markus Funke1 , Patricia Lago1
1
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1111, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Abstract
The increasing importance of sustainability in organisations makes it necessary to integrate sustainability
concerns into software-intensive systems at the earliest stages of development. However, there is a
lack of guidance on how to target such concerns within software architecture. We want to fill this
gap by proposing a specific type of architectural perspective—a sustainability perspective—tailored to
guide software architects incorporating sustainability into their software architecture processes. Unlike
architectural viewpoints, which are often too abstract or context-specific, perspectives are designed
to be flexible across different architectural frameworks so that they can be used in various industry
contexts. The goal of this extended abstract is twofold: (i) we motivate this research by discussing how
a sustainability perspective can help architects addressing novel sustainability concerns; and (ii) we want
to collect early feedback from the scientific community by outlining our planned research approach.
Keywords
Software Architecture, Architectural Perspective, Sustainability
1. Introduction
In this research, we aim to provide guidelines for software architects in tackling sustainability at
software design time. Sustainability has emerged as a key concern in contemporary software engi-
neering, reflecting its growing significance in organizational strategy and practices [1]. However,
achieving sustainability in software systems is not only the responsibility of isolated architectural
components, but rather embraces the entire software design—the software architecture.
Despite business’ increasing commitment to sustainability, integrating these new requirements
into the software architecture process remains unclear [1]. Many architectural decisions are
guided by experience and tacit knowledge [2, 3]. Despite sustainability gaining prominence
only in recent years [4], this necessary experience is not yet fully established. Consequently,
there is a need for structured guidelines to support architects effectively [5, 1]. Architectural
perspectives [6], in short perspectives, could serve as these guidelines.
Perspectives are defined as “a collection of architectural activities, tactics, and guidelines that
are used to ensure that a system exhibits a particular set of related quality properties that require
consideration across a number of the system’s architectural views” [2, p.47]. Addressing quality
properties is the essence of the architecture process. We believe that perspectives could serve
as a powerful tool to assist architects embedding sustainability into their designs—if they are
developed based on the needs of industry.
The 15th International Conference on Software Business (ICSOB 2024), November 18–20, 2024, Utrecht, the Netherlands
Envelope-Open m.t.funke@vu.nl (M. Funke); p.lago@vu.nl (P. Lago)
Orcid 0000-0003-2302-2555 (M. Funke); 0000-0002-2234-0845 (P. Lago)
© 2025 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
CEUR
ceur-ws.org
Workshop ISSN 1613-0073
Proceedings
2. Motivation and Related Work
Viewpoints [7] guide the architect in illustrating and representing one or more quality concerns
in form of views (i.e., diagrams or textual descriptions) by providing recurring patterns and
conventions [7, 2]. For instance, the deployment viewpoint guides architects in creating views
pertaining network and runtime concerns [2]. While this concept works on concerns that pertain
a rather isolated context and only certain stakeholders, other quality concerns such as security are
cross-cutting in nature and affect the whole architecture and various stakeholders simultaneously
[2, 8]. Therefore, cross-cutting concerns must be addressed across multiple views, too. Research
has shown that sustainability quality requirements can be considered as multi-dimensional [9]
and thus cross-cutting. Architectural perspectives provide structured guidance for managing
and addressing these cross-cutting concerns that affect multiple architectural views. This
adaptability makes them particularly relevant to industry, where software systems must meet
diverse and evolving requirements.
The work from Jagroep et al. [10] can be considered as the most related to ours. The
authors propose an energy consumption perspective and validate it with a case study. The
perspective is based on a new quality attribute ‘sustainability’ with its sub-characteristic
‘resource consumption’. The authors provide a set of measures and metrics for the identified
quality properties ‘software utilisation’, ‘workload energy’, and ‘energy usage’. Even though
such measures and metrics are indeed helpful for the further process of monitoring the software
system and reflecting on taken decisions, the concept of measures and metrics are not per se
part of an architectural perspective as these do not help in targeting certain concerns within
architecture views. We would consider these rather as architecture assessment.
Compared to our vision of a sustainability perspective, we want to tackle the problem from an
architecture knowledge angle rather than from a measurement angle. However, we want to build
up on the results of Jagroep et al. [10] and complement the existing gaps as outlined by their
future work: (i) providing a complete perspective including tactics, pitfalls, and the checklist;
and (ii) putting the work into a fresh light by updating it with a recent view on the notion of
sustainability in software engineering and software architecture.
In our research, we want to revisit the concept of perspectives by aligning them with industry
needs. To the best of our knowledge, there is currently no empirical evidence on (i) whether
and how perspectives are used in industry after their introduction 20 years ago, (ii) whether all
elements of a perspective are equally useful, and (iii) whether ‘energy consumption’ is the quality
concern that experts demand, as suggested by the existing perspective of Jagroep et al. [10].
Based on these new requirements, we define our intended research approach as outlined below.
3. The Envisioned Approach
To propose a sustainability perspective which is both grounded in theory and effective for
its usage in industrial practice we plan to use Design Science Research (DSR) [11] to create
iteratively our artifact. This paper represents our initial phase where we explore our research
idea and motivate our vision. Figure 1 outlines our planned research approach and the different
DSR phases, explained in the following.
Phase 1: Problem Definition. We adopt a forward snowballing approach to systematically
scan the literature to identify studies that have proposed new perspectives. We want to
understand how Rozanski & Woods’ [2] perspective catalog has evolved over time. We base our
forward snowballing on the two earliest works in which the notion of architectural perspectives
was first proposed: (i) the research paper by Woods & Rozanski [6], and (ii) the book by Rozanski
& Woods [2] that followed the paper a year later. Papers relating to perspectives should cite
at least one of these works.
1 2 3
Forward Focus Delphi Focus Case
Snowballing Group Methodology Group Study
Perspectives in Perspectives in Sustainability Sus. Perspective Sustainability
Literature Practice Perspective Draft Revision Perspective Final
Problem Definition Design & Validation Evaluation
Figure 1: The planned research approach
Since the notion of perspectives was proposed already almost 20 years ago, we are curious
about the industrial relevance of perspectives and whether the concept has evolved with industry
needs. This understanding will allow us to elicit the requirements to deliver an artifact that
is useful for professional practice. To this end, we plan to conduct a focus group among the
authors of the concept of architectural perspectives and two more experts who have years of
experience in industry and software architecture.
Phase 2: Artifact Design and Validation. Based on the elicited requirements, we conduct an
iterative process to design our perspective. Instead of presenting a finished artifact grounded
only in theory, we opt for an incremental design which is reviewed and improved by experts
in the field. Given the results of Phase 1, we may adapt the perspective structure and its elements
according to industry needs.
To select the perspective qualities, concerns and viewpoints, we plan to use the Delphi method
[12]. To derive a clear picture about the current needs in industry, we use a Delphi as “group
decision technique” [13] with multiple rounds until we reach consensus. We build consensus
about what qualities and concerns our perspective should focus on, as well as which viewpoints
it should target. For the other perspective elements (i.e., activities, tactics, pitfalls, and checklist),
we will conduct further research, make use of existing knowledge in the literature, and facilitate
our research experience in the field of software sustainability and sustainable architecture.
In the subsequent step we present the artifact to another group of experts in the form of
another focus group. We expect a different set of experts compared to the Delphi to validate
the perspective. We are interested in both the applicability in professional practice and further
input about the sustainability angle of our perspective.
Phase 3: Evaluation. After we have constructed a first prototype of our artifact that is accepted
by the focus group, we begin to implement and apply our perspective in a real case in the form
of a traditional case study. We have access to various industry collaborators in different sectors.
We evaluate our perspective with the experts involved in the case study; if applicable, we refine
it according to the feedback received.
4. Conclusion
In this work, we elaborate on the need for a novel architectural perspective on sustainability—with
the ultimate goal of creating such a perspective in a systematic way. We present our research
approach following the DSR phases. Our future work is to continue with research phase 1, i.e.,
exploring the literature through forward snowballing and reviewing the concept of perspectives
within an expert focus group. In our vision, the impact of formulating a sound sustainability
perspective would help software architects to create software-intensive systems that integrate
sustainability by design and in the long term.
Declaration on Generative AI
During the preparation of this work, the author(s) used Writefull in order to: Grammar and
spelling check, Paraphrase and reword. After using this tool/service, the author(s) reviewed
and edited the content as needed and take(s) full responsibility for the publication’s content.
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