Good, Bad, and Beautiful Software - In Search of Green Software Quality Factors

New emerging areas of software development and usage are green software engineering and software engineering for the planet. In green software engineering, software is developed, executed, and maintained in as environment friendly a way as possible. In software engineering for the planet, software actively helps in the fight against climate change. Currently, we lack good factors for estimating how good green software is. We consider this problem on three levels. First, a developer’s approach is to calculate the carbon footprint of software development, delivery, and maintenance. These factors are relatively easy to estimate but they lack an execution phase. Second, an engineer’s approach is to count how much resource software uses relative to its tasks. These factors are good for green software engineering but not enough for software engineering for the planet. Finally, a planet’s approach is to calculate how much software offers or how much damage it does to its environment in its life-time. Together these would give an ultimate solution for the green software factor dilemma but unfortunately it is not at all clear how to define metrics for such factors.