MORPHOSIS: A Lightweight Method Facilitating Sustainable Software Architectures

Managing the cost-effective evolution of industrial software systems is a challenging task because of their complexity and long lifetimes. Limited pro-active evolution planning and software architecture erosion often lead to huge maintenance costs in such systems. However, formerly researched approaches for evolution scenario analysis and architecture enforcement are only reluctantly applied by practitioners due to their perceived overhead and high costs. We have applied several recent sustainability evaluation and improvement approaches in a case study to the software architecture of a large industrial software system currently under development at ABB. We combined our selection of approaches in a lightweight method called MORPHOSIS, for which this paper presents experiences and lessons learned. We found that reasonable sustainability evaluation and improvement is possible already with limited efforts.