Exploring Sustainable Industrial Software System Development within the Software Architecture Environment

This thesis describes how sustainable development definitions can be transposed to the software architecture environment for the industrial software system domain. In a case study, sustainable development concerns from three companies are investigated for their influence on the dimensions of sustainable development: economical, environmental, and social sustainability. Classifying the case study’s concerns, in the thesis’s Software Engineering taxonomy, shows that the software development concerns are in majority and the software architecture concerns surprisingly few. The economical sustainability concerns dominate followed by social sustainability concerns, including both concerns successfully met and concerns to be met. Sustainable industrial software system development is in the thesis defined as: “Sustainable industrial software system development meets current stakeholders’ needs without compromising the software development organization’s ability to meet the needs of future stakeholders”. Understanding current and future stakeholders concerns is necessary for the formulation of sustainability goals and metrics. Clarifying the interrelationships among stakeholders’ concerns’ impact on business goals and software qualities, in the thesis’s Influencing Factors method, proves to help stakeholders understand their future needs. Trust is found to be critical for sustainable development. For the establishing of trust between system and system users, the usability quality is vital. To implement usability support in the architecture in the early design phase, reusable architectural responsibilities are created. The reusable architectural responsibilities are integrated into an experience factory and used by the product line system architects, resulting in a return of investment of 25:2.