Software Sustainability Characteristic for Software Development towards Long Living Software RUZITA AHMAD, AZHAM HUSSAIN & FAUZIAH BAHAROM School of Computing University Utara Malaysia 06010 UUM Sintok KEDAH rita_azura08@yahoo.com, azham.h@uum.edu.my, fauziah@uum.edu.my https://sites.google.com/site/drazhamhussain/ Abstract: Software sustainability is a kind of software endurance that capable to lead the software development to be surviving in a long time period with employing the rules of sustainability paradigm. Even though, the jumble of identification of characteristics and sub-characteristic towards software sustainability in the presenting works recently are un-certainty declaration in utilizing the justification of the requirements towards achieving software sustainability. This paper investigates the state-of-the-art of software development towards software sustainability by identifying the important characteristic and sub-characteristic with organizing into the three pillars dimension of sustainability which are environmental, economic, and social. The Systematic Literature Review (SLR) was used to discover the holistic understanding and views on software sustainability, including the recent processes, activities, performance, and limitations that relates to the important of characteristic and sub-characteristic of software development. The results show the important features for software development towards software sustainability with embedding the essential criteria for each characteristic that are related to sustainability paradigm. Key-Words: - Software Sustainability, Sustainable Characteristic and Sub-characteristic, Systematic Literature Review, and Sustainability Paradigm 1 Introduction In the new globalization era, software production is dressed in the new clothes as to claim a novelty with future requirements that starts from the existing software infrastructure and ends with tightly integrated software systems realized by distributed systems that can support the core business process of the company [6]. Nowadays, the software development is developed based on the reused software and has been driven by the different paradigms [46]. The concept of heterogeneous software acts as a main role in supporting the business process with the capability in sustaining the high dimensionality of data. For instance, the client server architectures and systems are distributed based on several databases, transactions of processing monitors, and involved the application of web servers. For example, the critical software in the industry organizations is constantly being integrated with reused of application provided by Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Enterprise knowledge sharing (know-how), Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), and the latest one is Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) [3], [48]. Recently, the integration of applications has their own credibility and powerful role in ensuring the long living software in order to increase the accountability, reliability and functionality of the software systems. In addition, the capability of technologies is claimed to reduce costs, positive returns to the subscription models, and to improve usability in the software systems [26]. Literatures reveal that the issue to develop software for the long living system is closely related to sustainability paradigm and it is already highlighted in this new era’s software production [5], [8], [19], [20], [21], [22], [23], [31], [33], [43], [53]. However, the concept of sustainability by integrating the three pillar dimensions which are environmental, economic, and social does not exist in the integration of technologies used today. Unfortunately, the integration of the applications in the critical software is claimed as non-sensitive in influencing the impacts of sustainability [7], [25], [28]. Besides, spending on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) equipments with un-sustainable features and application will be WSEAS TRANSACTIONS on BUSINESS and ECONOMICS Ruzita Ahmad, Azham Hussain, Fauziah Baharom E-ISSN: 2224-2899 55 Volume 15, 2018