Towards an Architectural Perspective for Sustainability

The increasing importance of sustainability in organisations makes it necessary to integrate sustainability concerns into software-intensive systems at the earliest stages of development. However, there is a lack of guidance on how to target such concerns within software architecture. We want to fill this gap by proposing a specific type of architectural perspective-a sustainability perspective-tailored to guide software architects incorporating sustainability into their software architecture processes. Unlike architectural viewpoints, which are often too abstract or context-specific, perspectives are designed to be flexible across different architectural frameworks so that they can be used in various industry contexts. The goal of this extended abstract is twofold: (i) we motivate this research by discussing how a sustainability perspective can help architects addressing novel sustainability concerns; and (ii) we want to collect early feedback from the scientific community by outlining our planned research approach.