Publication: November/December 2013

Change is the norm in software, and architects must address and embrace it to ensure the architecture can endure different types of change via efficient maintenance and evolution throughout its entire lifecycle. Some changes might only affect local parts of a system, while others have more systemic impact that can involve various stakeholders and disciplines.

In general, architects can employ three approaches to handle change: refactoring, renovating and rearchitecting. Such strategies contribute to the overall area of architecture sustainability—but have yet to be treated as a coherent whole. The aim of this special issue is to encourage such discussions.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:
• State of the art and practice in architecture sustainability
• Recognizing architectural sustainability problems early by architecture introspection (performed by the architects themselves) and assessment (performed by a third party)
• Fundamental elements of architecture refactoring, re-architecting and renovating, how they complement each other, and strategies for recognizing when they are appropriate
• Ensuring architecture sustainability through architecture governance
• Processes, tools and technologies to support refactoring, renovating, re-architecting and their governance
• Managing traceability between requirements and architecture decisions that lead to architecture success or problems
• The effect of architectural drift or erosion on architectural sustainability and potential counter-measures
• Achieving architecture sustainability through migration to modern computing environments (e.g. cloud computing)
• Measuring architecture sustainability
• Managing the sustainability of product lines comprised of multiple products that have common and individual changes

Questions?
For more information about the focus, contact the Guest Editors:
• Paris Avgeriou, University of Groningen, The Netherlands: paris@cs.rug.nl
• Michael Stal, Siemens Corporate Technology, Germany: michael.stal@siemens.com
• Rich Hilliard, software systems architect, USA: r.hilliard@computer.org

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