Practical Feasibility of Sustainable Software Engineering Tools and Techniques

TL;DR

This study assesses the practical feasibility of Sustainable Software Engineering tools in regulated industrial environments, highlighting practitioner preferences and organizational factors affecting adoption.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into the adoption barriers and preferences for SSE tools in regulated industries, guiding future tool design and implementation.

Findings

Practitioners prefer tools integrated into IDEs or pipelines.

Minimal, locally scoped data requirements are favored.

Regulatory compliance and approval processes influence feasibility perceptions.

Abstract

While Sustainable Software Engineering (SSE) tools are widely studied in academia, their practical feasibility in industrial workflows, particularly in regulated environments, remains poorly understood. This study investigates how software practitioners perceive the feasibility of existing SSE tools and techniques, and examines the technical, organizational, and cultural factors shaping their adoption in practice. We identified prominent categories of SSE tools targeting energy consumption, green refactoring, and workload management, and evaluated them along three practitioner-relevant dimensions: installation, input requirements, and output formats. These were presented through an interactive web application and explored in workshops with 16 practitioners from a regulated financial-sector organization, followed by a survey of 27 software practitioners. Our findings suggest that the practitioners strongly favored tools that integrate into existing IDEs or pipelines, require minimal and locally scoped data access, and provide interpretable, actionable outputs such as dashboards or automated refactoring suggestions. In regulated settings, compliance requirements, approval processes, and time constraints significantly shaped feasibility perceptions. Our contribution lies in providing empirical evidence of these preferences alongside other factors that affect regulated industrial contexts. The findings offer actionable guidance for designing SSE tools that better align with real-world development workflows and organizational constraints.