Green in Software Engineering
Coral Calero
Instituto de Tecnologías y Sistemas de la Información. University of Castilla-La Mancha
Paseo de la Universidad, 4 13071 Ciudad Real (Spain)
[email protected]
Abstract. ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) are a key technology in achieving environmental goals but they also have a negative impact on
the environment. It is essential to control the use of ICTs, in order to reduce their
impact on sustainability. This tutorial will be focused in software sustainability.
We want to play an active role to raise awareness on the part of all those involved
with software: the companies that develop software, those who buy it and also
the people who use it. We will start by giving a general overview on the Sustainability in general and on the Software Sustainability in particular. Then, we will
present the main contributions and works that are been developed and how these
contributions have evolved over the last few years. We will finish by giving a
snapshot on what areas are the most active and which need to be emphasized.
1
General Description of the tutorial
Sustainability is gaining importance worldwide, reinforced by several initiatives
with wide media coverage such as the Earth hour organized by WWF (World Wide
Fund for Nature). Other organizations such as the United Nations (UN) also highlight
the importance of reducing energy consumption and our carbon footprint, including this
issue in the Millennium Development Goals [1].
In Rio+20, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, the World
leaders approved an agreement entitled “The Future We Want,” where it is stated that
“We recognize the critical role of technology as well as the importance of promoting
innovation, in particular in developing countries. We invite governments, as appropriate, to create enabling frameworks that foster environmentally sound technology, research and development, and innovation, including in support of green economy in the
context of sustainable development and poverty eradication... “
Although these initiatives point to ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) as a key technology in achieving these goals, we must be aware that ICTs also
have a negative impact on the environment. As far as the ICT sector is concerned, it
contributes about 2% of global CO2 emissions. The total electricity consumption of the
ICT sector is forecast to increase by almost 60 percent from 2007 to 2020 owing to the
increasing number of devices, as well as to network expansion [2].
It is therefore essential to control the use of ICTs, in order to reduce their impact on
sustainability as much as possible. We will focus specifically on software technology,
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© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011
because software is more complex to sell, service, and support than hardware; and dollar for dollar, software generates more downstream economic activity than hardware
[3], but it has been disregarded in this area until now. Spending on software is growing
faster than spending on IT overall – 4.8% a year between 2008-2013, compared to 3.3%
for all IT spending [3].
Sustainability has also become more and more important to business recently. According to a global IBM survey in 2008, 47% of organizations have begun to redesign
their business models on the basis of sustainability, treating sustainable development
as a new source of innovation, a new opportunity for cutting costs, and a new mechanism for gaining competitive advantages. In general, the initiatives that foster respect
for the environment by means of ICT, IT, software, etc. are called Green or Greening
ICT/IT/Software, sometimes sustainability in IT, etc.
The problem that arises is that, as in any new discipline, there is no a clear map of
concepts and definitions.
This tutorial will be focused in software sustainability because although still in its
early stages, is a very important research topic that will be of great importance in the
next few years. We want to play an active role to raise awareness on the part of all those
involved with software: the companies that develop software, those who buy it and also
the people who use it.
As a first step we will give a general overview on the different aspects and concepts
related to Sustainability: from the organization sustainability to the software sustainability.
After giving this general overview of concepts, we will focus particularly on Software Sustainability.
The way in which to achieve sustainable software is principally by improving its
power consumption. Whereas hardware has been constantly improved so as to be energy efficient, software has not. The software development life cycle and related development tools and methodologies rarely, if ever, consider energy efficiency as an objective [4]. Energy efficiency has never been a key requirement in the development of
software-intensive technologies, and so there is a very large potential for efficiency
improvements [5].
In the second part of the tutorial, we will focus on software sustainability. We will
provide existing definitions for software sustainability. We will pay attention to some
misconceptions existing around software sustainability because the literature contains
some definitions of Sustainable (or Sustainability), while others refer to the term Green
(or Greenability) being even authors who use both terms synonymously.
We then we go deeper into the software sustainability dimensions, by means of definitions and examples to clarify them.
Once all the terminology will be discussed and the fundamentals presented, we will
show the main contributions and works that are been developed into the Software Sustainability arena and how these contributions have evolved over the last few years.
The final part of the tutorial will be devoted to give a snapshot on what areas are the
most active and which ones need to be emphasized.
References
1. Calero, C. and Piattini M., (2015). Green in Software Engineering. ISBN 978-3-319-085807. Springer.
2. IDC, Aid to recovery: the economic impact of IT, software, and the Microsoft ecosystem on
the global economy. 2009
3. The Climate Group (2008). SMART 2020: Enabling the low carbon economy in the
information age. The Global eSustainability Initiative, Brussels, Belgium, 2008.
4. Sobotta, A., Sobotta, I. and Gotze, J. (eds.)(2010). Greening IT. How Greener IT Can Form
a Solid Foundation For a Low-Carbon Society. The Greening IT Initiative.
5. Abenius, S. Green IT & Green Software – time and energy savings using existing tools in
Environmental Informatics and Industrial Environmental Protection: Concepts, Methods
and Tools. 2009. pp. 57–66.