Sustainable Digitalization - Terms & Definitions

Todo

Terms and definitions in the field of sustainable digitalization can be quite confusing. This note tries to separate some terms by using definitions from scientific literature. Please note, that currently this list is not complete and still inconsistent.

Sustainable Software

dickenhancingsoftwareengineering2010 (pg. 3)

Sustainable Software is software, whose impacts on economy, society, human beings, and environment that result from development, deployment, and usage of the software are minimal and/or which have a positive effect on sustainable development.

German translation:

"Grüne Software" ist Software, deren direkte und indirekte negativen Auswirkungen auf Menschen, Gesellschaft und Umwelt über ihren gesamten Lebenszyklus hinweg minimal sind und die bestenfalls einen zusätzlichen positiven Beitrag zur nachhaltigen Entwicklung leisten.

dickenhancingsoftwareengineering2010 (pg. 3)

Sustainable Software Engineering is the art of defining and developing software products in a way so that the negative and positive impacts on sustainability that result and/or are expected to result from the software product over its whole lifecycle are continuously assessed, documented, and optimized.

Five dimensions of sustainable software

@Becker.etal.2015.KarlskronaManifestoSustainability:

Green Software

Green Software - SDIA

bener.etal.2014.greensoftware (comment) (pg. 3)

Greening in software aims to reduce the environmental impact caused by the software itself. [...] Green specifications provide a way to indicate a service’s carbon footprint and eventually specify operational constraints to allow more flexibility during service provisioning.

Green software engineering is concerned with the environmental dimension of sustainable software engineering.

Sustainable Computing / Green IT

bener.etal.2014.greensoftware (pg. 2)

Green IT is the study and practice of using computing resources efficiently to reduce negative impacts on the environment. Green IT is applicable to various hightech domains, such as datacenters, mobile computing, and embedded systems.

Sustainable Computing ≈ Green Computing ≈ Green IT

→ in comparison to green software, green IT includes also other aspects within IT: resource consumption, water consumption in data centers, embodied carbon of ICT devices…

Green Software Engineering

Green Software Engineering is an umbrella for software energy consumption, green mining, green IT, and sustainable computing.
Hindle, A. (2016). Green Software Engineering: The Curse of Methodology. 2016 IEEE 23rd International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering (SANER), 5, 46–55. https://doi.org/10.1109/SANER.2016.60

Sustainability by Software / Green by IT

Sustainability by Software ≈ Green by IT ≈ Software Engineering for the Planet ≈ Software for Sustainability [1]


The environmental impacts and sustainability of software are discussed using different terms, depending on the context. This chapter is based on the definition by Dick et al. [4]: “Sustainable Software is software, whose impacts on economy, society, human beings, and environment that result from development, deployment, and usage of the software are minimal and/or which have a positive effect on sustainable development” [4, 5]. We use the terms “sustainable software,”“green software,” and “energy- and resource-efficient software” interchangeably. The latter terms point out the focus on consuming fewer natural resources, i.e., environmental and resource protection.

Guldner, A., Kern, E., Kreten, S., & Naumann, S. (2021). Criteria for Sustainable Software Products: Analyzing Software, Informing Users, and Politics. In C. Calero, M. Á. Moraga, & M. Piattini (Eds.), Software Sustainability (pp. 17–42). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69970-3_2

See also

Calero, C., Moraga, M. Á., & Piattini, M. (2021). Introduction to Software Sustainability. In C. Calero, M. Á. Moraga, & M. Piattini (Eds.), Software Sustainability (pp. 1–15). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69970-3_1

🔗 References


  1. Kern, E., Guldner, A., & Naumann, S. (2019). Including Software Aspects in Green IT: How to Create Awareness for Green Software Issues. In V. Kharchenko, Y. Kondratenko, & J. Kacprzyk (Eds.), Green IT Engineering: Social, Business and Industrial Applications (pp. 3–20). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00253-4_1 ↩︎