The Nebuchadnezzar Effect: Dreaming of Sustainable Software through Sustainable Software Architectures

Sustainability is emerging as an area of growing interest in the field of software engineering. While there is no agreed definition of the concept it is increasingly being considered as a non-functional requirement; a desired quality of a software system. One of the principal challenges in defining sustainability as a non-functional requirement is how to develop appropriate metrics and measures to demonstrate that the software is sustainable. Software architectures are the foundation of any software system and provide a mechanism for reasoning about quality attributes. However, architectural design is in part a creative process based on the level expertise of the software architect and tacit architectural knowledge, and is often made in an unsystematic and undocumented manner. Given the high dependency of non-functional requirements on their software architecture, this paper proposes that sustainable software architectures are fundamental to the development of technical sustainable software to address architectural drift and erosion, and architectural knowledge vaporization.