Final report on Sustainable Software Design published by the German Environment Agency

The results of the research project "Sustainable Software Design - Development of a Methodology for Evaluating the Resource Efficiency of Software Products" were published by German Environment Agency (Umweltbundesamt, UBA) at the end of 2018.

This final report presents the approach, measurement methodologies, tools, and criteria for sustainable software products. The study is breaking new ground, because so far the influence of software on the indirect use of natural resources could not be determined.
The researchers developed an impact model that shows the relationship between the use of software and energy consumption and hardware usage. Also a catalog of criteria with a total of 25 criteria and 76 indicators for checking the environmental impact of software products was developed.
By means of several case studies it could be shown that the evaluation and measurement method can be applied in practice and relevant differences of software products of the same functionality can be represented or measured.

Further information:

• Report download (PDF, in German): https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/publikationen/entwicklung-anwendung-von-bewertungsgrundlagen-fuer
• Set of criteria (Website, in English): http://green-software-engineering.de/en/kriterienkatalog-v01/introduction.html