Architecture sustainability

• Grant number: 18/13578-4
• Support Opportunities: Research Grants - Visiting Researcher Grant - International
• Start date: October 22, 2018
• End date: November 21, 2018
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Computer Science - Computing Methodologies and Techniques
• Principal Investigator: Elisa Yumi Nakagawa
• Grantee: Elisa Yumi Nakagawa
• Visiting researcher: Rafael Capilla
• Visiting researcher institution: Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Móstoles (URJC), Spain
• Host Institution: Instituto de Ciências Matemáticas e de Computação (ICMC). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

As software sustainability faces with different problems ranging from energy to individual and technical, we will focus on the research proposal on design sustainability, as a way to produce more stable architectures and avoid architecture erosion and decay. Hence, it becomes necessary to define new software metrics able to estimate design sustainability in different scenarios and times, from static to dynamic concerns. Therefore, in this proposal, we will address the following research problem: "Is it possible to provide a framework and metrics to estimate design sustainability including systems that demand some kind of runtime reconfiguration?". Based on the research problem stated above, we will explore all the related issues pertaining to technical debt and software metrics and explore which of these can be used for the objectives of the proposal and define new metrics or combination of them that can advance the estimation of architecture smells and produce more sustainable architectures. We summarize below the main research objectives of the proposal: *Analyze existing metrics used to estimate architecture smells and technical debt concerns to understand the state of the art; *Identify potential application domains and systems where sustainability can be used to extend the longevity of such systems and suggest a framework connecting quality attributes with metrics; and *Suggest new metrics or combination of existing ones to derive more accurate sustainability indicators. The work activities planned for the research period (1 month) are the following: 1. Presentation of a tutorial entitled "Software Sustainability", a 3-hour research tutorial at USP (having as target audience PhD students and professors in Computer Science); 2. Analyze characteristics of software-intensive systems and produce a set of sustainability goals and requirements including the dynamic aspects; 3. Suggest a solution to model two sustainability dimensions: technical and environmental and the metrics that could be used to detail each particular dimension in both architecture and code; 4. Plan a set of experiments as evaluation using data from real systems to test the proposed metrics from development phases to maintenance and runtime monitoring; 5. Preparation of joint publications, in particular, refereed papers in top ranked international conferences and journals. (AU)