Towards a Green Quotient for Software Projects

TL;DR

This paper discusses the importance of assessing the environmental impact of software projects and proposes a quick method to measure their 'greenness' based on SDLC decisions, addressing a critical sustainability challenge.

Contribution

It introduces an approach to rapidly evaluate the sustainability of software projects during development, filling a gap in actionable awareness tools for green software engineering.

Findings

Initial positive feedback on the proposed assessment approach

Highlights the need for sustainability metrics in SDLC

Industry perspective on green software challenges

Abstract

As sustainability takes center stage across businesses, green and energy-efficient choices are more crucial than ever. While it is becoming increasingly evident that software and the software industry are substantial and rapidly evolving contributors to carbon emissions, there is a dearth of approaches to create actionable awareness about this during the software development lifecycle (SDLC). Can software teams comprehend how green are their projects? Here we provide an industry perspective on why this is a challenging and worthy problem that needs to be addressed. We also outline an approach to quickly gauge the "greenness" of a software project based on the choices made across different SDLC dimensions and present the initial encouraging feedback this approach has received.