Diversifying Software Architecture for Sustainability: A Value-Based Perspective

Abstract

Although the concept of software diversity has been thoroughly adopted by software architects for many years, yet the advent of using diversity to achieve sustainability is overlooked. We argue that option thinking is an effective decision making tool to evaluate the trade-offs between architectural strategies and their long-term values under uncertainty. Our method extends cost-benefit analysis method CBAM. Unlike CBAM, our focus is on valuing the options which diversification can embed in the architecture and their corresponding value using real options pricing theory. The intuitive assumption is that the value of these options can provide the architect with insights on the long-term performance of these decisions in relation to some scenarios of interest and use them as the basis for reasoning about sustainability. The method aims to answer the following: (1)

Run-time evaluation of architectures: A case study of diversification in IoT

“…Based on design-time knowledge, the architects can decide on the options to be implemented. We use CBAM and options theory [24] to evaluate different architecture options potentials at design-time [25], where the architecture options providing high option value are considered for diversification of the IoT Case study (Section 5). However, as the environment is dynamic, value potentials can fluctuate at run-time.…”

“…To answer RQ2, our proposed approach adopts change detection tests to check whether the benefit of the dao currently being used is getting significantly worse [17]. If it is significantly worse, a method inspired by the multi-objective optimization literature Figure 3: Steps of the approach, where the design-time evaluation [25] forms the initial design decisions and run-time evaluation complements it. [26,21] is adopted to identify the dao with the optimal trade-off between cost and benefit.…”

“…The steps of the approach are summarized in Figure 3. Here, the design-270 time evaluation is the one proposed in [25], which uses options theory (i.e. an economics-driven approach) [27] to evaluate the diversified architectural options .…”

“…Design diversity [8,28,29,9,25] is used to design for dependability under uncertainty: the greater the uncertainty, the more diversity the architects may need to apply to improve performance. We denote a software architecture which embeds diversity as diversified architecture option dao and the set of dao as DAO.…”

Reference architectures: factors for their sustainability

“…Carrillo et al [13] describe a congurable meta-model whose goal is to achieve architectural knowledge (AK) sustainability and a set of criteria suggests ways to estimate the technical sustainability of AK. Other important initiatives that address sustainability in software architecture can be found in [27,53,54,57]. However, our SM did not nd any work dealing specically with sustainability on reference architectures.…”