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Sustainability ArchDebts: An Economics-Driven Approach for Evaluating Sustainable Requirements

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Abstract

Sustainability refers to the ability of an architecture to achieve its goals and continue to deliver value on technical, environmental, social, and/or economic dimensions. Given the increased awareness of the need to conserve resources and be more sustainable, users are becoming more reluctant to support design decisions that are overdesigned or underperforming. There is a need for an efficient requirement evaluation framework that ensures that optimal software performance is achieved at a minimal cost. The goal of this chapter is to develop an objective decision-support framework for reasoning about sustainability requirements in relation to architecture decisions under uncertainty. We propose an economics-driven architectural evaluation method which extends Cost Benefit Analysis Method (CBAM) and integrates principles of modern portfolio theory to address the risks when linking sustainability requirements to architectural design decisions. The method aims at identifying portfolios of architecture design decisions which are more promising for adding/delivering value while reducing risk on the sustainability dimensions, and it quantifies the sustainability debt of these decisions. The results show that the method can make the value, cost, and risks of architectural design decisions and sustainability requirements explicit.

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Correspondence to Bendra Ojameruaye .

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Ojameruaye, B., Bahsoon, R. (2021). Sustainability ArchDebts: An Economics-Driven Approach for Evaluating Sustainable Requirements. In: Calero, C., Moraga, M.Á., Piattini, M. (eds) Software Sustainability. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69970-3_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69970-3_16

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-69969-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-69970-3

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