A Green Model for Sustainable Software Engineering

Information Communication Technology (ICT) has a strong impact on sustainable development due its rising demands for energy and resources needed when building hardware and software products. Most of the efforts spent on Green ICT/IT have been dedicated to addressing the effects of hardware on the environment but little have been considering the effects of building software products as well. Efficient software will indirectly consume less energy by using up less hardware equipment to run. Our contributions in this paper are devoted to building a two level green software model that covers the sustainable life cycle of a software product and the software tools promoting green and environmentally sustainable software. In the first level we propose a new green software engineering process that is a hybrid process between sequential, iterative, and agile development processes to produce an environmentally sustainable one. Each stage of the software process is then further studied to produce a green and sustainable stage. We propose either green guidelines or green processes for each software stage in the engineering process. We add to the software life cycle the requirements stage and the testing stage. We also include in the first level a complete list of metrics to measure the greenness of each stage in terms of the first order effects of ICT on the environment for a green software engineering process. No effort has been placed before in designing a green software engineering process. The second level explains how software itself can be used as a tool to aid in green computing by monitoring resources in an energy efficient manner. Finally, we show and explain relationships that can be found between the two levels in our proposed model to make the software engineering process and product green and sustainable.