Towards Green Software Process: A Review on Integration of Sustainability Dimensions and Waste Management

Abstract

Green software and software sustainability are among important efforts to ensure software durability and its long-term usage. The overall target of green software is to produce sustainable software products with minimal negative impact on the environment. In general, software sustainability is associated with the ability of software to operate in a longer time and remain viable in the environments. Past studies emphasizes on hardware in respect to energy consumption. The fact that software coordinates the movements of hardware indirectly carries significant effects on hardware components energy consumptions. For instance, a rather complex set of instructions designed in certain software system may somehow increase power consumptions. Thus, the software still affected the use of hardware that indirectly leads to energy consumption. Recent studies reveal that green software in certain ways taken into account some of the sustainability dimension. In order to achieve green software, it must also support the sustainable development and waste reduction. We believe that the integration between sustainability and waste management in software development life cycle phases will have good potential in making software tolerable and applicable for the new generation to cater the demands for greener environment. In this paper, we review the existing works pertaining to the important key aspects in green software towards sustainability. Additionally, we explore the potential of current waste management efforts within software development area and how it can be beneficial towards green software.