Technical Debt and Green Software

Sustainability is becoming central in IT. A software system can be defined as green in two cases:

• When it enables sustainability projects (e.g., a water waste monitoring system)
• When the software itself is designed in such a way as to minimize its environmental impact, which in this specific case translates into minimizing electricity consumption.

Green Software Engineering aims to find best practices for implementing the second case. The optimization actions that can be implemented are many and applicable at different stages of software development. For example, one can intervene when writing code through specific quality analysis tools or when designing the software architecture, choosing cloud solutions with optimized elastic resource management.

Managing and removing Technical Debt is among the recommended practices. Recent studies have demonstrated a correlation between improved performance and removing code smells and architectural smells. At Arcan, we are studying a new metric, the “Sustainability metric,” to measure the carbon footprint caused by the presence of Technical Debt.

If these topics intrigue you, we recommend watching the “Debito Tecnico e Green Software” webinar by Ilaria Pigazzini, CEO at Arcan, and Marco Bodini, Network Engineer at Brennercom Spa, hosted by Bicocca Alumni (webinar language: Italian).

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