What is New When Talking About Sustainable Software Architectures?

The macroscopic level of software design is software architecture, and architecture choices impact system qualities, including sustainability. Several studies have explored ways to achieve sustainable architectures: those that can endure over the long-term. However, there needs to be a broader understanding of such architectures. The contribution of this paper is to offer a view of the characteristics of sustainable software architectures. We first scrutinized the scientific literature and systematically selected 82 studies. We extracted 51 characteristics from non-domain-specific studies and 37 from domain-specific ones, categorized them into themes, and then analyzed the papers within those categories. We conclude that no new technical approaches have been proposed specifically for sustainable architectures; the only newness is a change in the mindset, towards greater awareness of sustainability. We also found that the dimensions of sustainability—technical, social, economic, and environmental—have yet to be comprehensively addressed.