Development of a Label for Green Software Products: A person-oriented view

Abstract

Information and communication technologies (ICT) consume a lot of natural resources and influence the life of sociality in many different contexts. Thus, academia came up with research projects addressing sustainability issues of ICT. Generally, these comprise social, economic and environmental aspects. Some approaches add an individual and a technical dimension. The last two dimensions refer to issues of human capital (individual sustainability) and to durability of technical systems (technical sustainability). [1] Overall, most of the activities seem to deal with questions regarding environment so far. Relative to research regarding “Green IT” mainly focusing on hardware issues the consideration of the software side is a new research field. It seems as if the relevance of integrating the software side into improvements of the ICT energy consumption and sociality development has arrived in the research community. Here, different suggestions on how to define “green” or “sustainable software” can be found (e.g. [2, 3]). Above, there are, among others, approaches for sustainability issues in requirement engineering [4, 5], corresponding procedure models [3, 6] and measurement methods [7, 8]. In order to reach a transformation in ICT towards a more sustainable way of developing, distributing, using, deactivating and disposing of software, it is necessary to include everyone who is related to these life cycle phases of a software product [9]. Next to the research activities, this contains the practical and personal side. The question arises how to inform the nonacademic stakeholders about sustainability issues of software. One idea is to develop a label for these kind of software and thus create more transparency, hopefully interest and greater awareness regarding these aspects. In the long term this might lead to an attitude change in software aspects.