Supporting Sustainability and Technical Debt-Driven Design Decisions in Software Architectures

Degraded software usually incurs higher energy consumption, therefore suboptimal decisions in software architectures may lead to higher technical debt and less sustainable software products. There are metrics and tools to calculate technical debt and energy consumption of software, but it is required to provide mechanisms to store their relationship and how they change depending on the design decisions. In addition, there are different models for calculating the same metric and different metrics to measure technical debt and power consumption, and software engineers require selecting the most suitable model and metric depending on the software product context. This work presents a metamodel called ARCMEL to provide the required base of knowledge for supporting green-aware design decisions and to flexibly configure and select metrics and their models. ARCMEL has been implemented as part of the ARCMEL SCAT tool. Its validation is also presented in terms of completeness and flexibility