Green Software Process Based on Sustainability Dimensions: The Empirical Investigation

Abstract

Green and sustainability issues are being considered as the alternative effort to ensure the long-time usage and durable of a software. The overall target for green software is to produce sustainable software products with minimal negative impact on the environment. In general, sustainability in software is associated with the ability to operate in a longer time and viable in their environments. Issues regarding sustainability are usually based on economy, social, and environmental view. In order to achieve and maintain sustainability in software, software process should undergo and comply with green. Previous studies emphasis on green hardware in respect to energy consumption, power consumption, waste reduction and disposal. However, it seems lack of studies on green software even though software has impact indirectly to the environment and to the software itself. This paper presents the empirical study conducted in Malaysia to investigate the sustainable practices in software process toward achieving green process and environment. One hundred and two (102) participants were involved in this survey and most of them were software engineers and software developers. The results reveal that the sustainability practices are important and relevant for green software process.

The Development of Green Software Process Model

“…It is conducted with the specified team by getting information from the users. The software requirements specification (SRS) is delivered as the outcome of requirement gathering and analysis activity [30]. A good software requirement specification aims to satisfy the needs of its customers.…”

“…In addition, the collection of requirement specifications is required through electronic methods to save resources such as paper and preserve the environment. Furthermore, as [30,32] suggested, software should adopt new hardware for energy efficiency and coping with power down during its operation.…”

“…Therefore, the design team needs to cooperate with the software developer on this document www.ijacsa.thesai.org before proceeding to the next phase. All stakeholders must review the Document Design Specification (DDS), and the best approach is selected based on budget, time constraints, risk, robustness, and design method [30]. Reference [31] suggested that performance, reusability, and documentation are among the green analysis criteria in the green process.…”

“…There are different types of tests performed by integration system testing. Reference [30] stated that testing aims to ensure that the developed software is free of bugs, faults, or defects and meets all requirements specified during the requirement stage. The specifications are needed to be understood by conducted initial testing at the final stage of requirements.…”

“…According to [32], the software development team faces time constraints to find errors through testing. Therefore, previous studies [22,30] recommend using automated testing, reusing test cases to determine performance scalability and resource testing. In the testing phase, the program involved improvement of energy efficiency will use energy measuring instruments.…”