Green Software Development and Design for Environmental Sustainability

While research results exist in energy efficient hardware and its components to achieve environmental sustainability, major research is needed to relate energy consumption of hardware to energy consumption of its executing software. Since software is playing an increasing role in supporting our society its energy efficiency and environmental impact become more important. Green IT and green software aim to achieve environmentally sustainable computing. However applying this concept to the existing software systems to meet business demand or designing new green and sustainable software are complex tasks. Applying environmental requirements brings new trade-offs in addition to software quality requirements. Therefore new trade-off analysis needs to be done as regards to environmental sustainability requirements. Moreover, how quality requirements relate to environmental sustainability also needs to be investigated. This doctoral research focuses to investigate the trade-off between software quality requirements and environmental sustainability (i.e., become greener) by means of empirical analyses and controlled experiments on different software contexts (e.g. improving database software functionality and developing new software). The research methodology of this study is based on quantitative research methods with the integration of empirical and case study methods. Some preliminary results are already obtained from two different analyses; 1) empirical energy consumption analysis on database software, 2) qualitative analysis on quality and sustainability of software. The deviations for energy consumption suggesting that there are significant opportunities to save energy.