Two perspectives on reference architecture sustainability

In the context of software architectures, sustainability has been investigated as an important quality property to assess how well these architectures support changes over time. Several initiatives to achieve sustainable software architectures/systems can be already found. In parallel, reference architectures have served as an effective support to facilitate and standardize the development and evolution of software systems, including in complex, critical application domains. By encompassing valuable knowledge of specific domains, the reference architectures survival is considered of utmost importance, however, the most of such architectures have not been updated since their first version. Furthermore, there is a lack of works investigating how a reference architectures, by itself, can become sustainable and/or can contribute to develop sustainable systems in a domain. The main contribution of this paper is to provide a first view about sustainability on reference architectures. Resulting from our expertise on reference architectures, we bring out the two perspectives on their sustainability: (i) sustainability IN reference architectures; and (ii) sustainability OF reference architectures. In particular, for the perspective OF, we analyzed 20 existing reference architectures to assess their sustainability, and we found most of them were not updated over time. Hence, we also provide an initial set of aspects that could contribute to address sustainability of those architectures.