Towards Software Sustainability Guidelines for Long-living Industrial Systems

Long-living software systems are sustainable if they can be cost-effectively maintained and evolved over their complete life-cycle. Software-intensive systems in the industrial automation domain are typically long-living and cause high evolution costs, because of new customer requirements, technology changes, and failure reports. Many methods for sustainable software development have been proposed in the scientific literature, but most of them are not applied in industrial practice. We identified typical evolution scenarios in the industrial automation domain and conducted an extensive literature search to extract a number of guidelines for sustainable software development based on the methods found in literature. For validation purposes, we map one evolution scenario to these guidelines in this paper.