Is it true that nowadays, software development is managed to be environmental friendly? How can testing help ensure that software is designed and developed in an environmentally friendly way? What are some common sustainability testing tools and techniques?
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I found out one approach named LCA, comprehensively evaluating the environmental impact of a product throughout its entire life cycle, including raw material extraction, manufacturing, use, and end-of-life. Testing supports LCA by providing data on energy consumption, emissions, and resource usage at each stage.
Ref: Life Cycle Analysis - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics.
This is an interesting aspect about testing that i didn’t think of… So… just a silly question, could we actually improve testing sustainability by reducing the errors in our code before testing them? This would mean less test runs and errors to be detected → less electricity used and faster deployment rate.
And with things like AI, it could potentially help developers to fix coding errors before testing, and maybe help companies to choose a suitable time to test to help reduce their carbon emission (similar to what Microsoft did with windows update in windows 11) if time to deploy wasn’t their concern.
but on the other hand, training these AIs will undoubtedly require a huge amount of power, so I guess everything has their pros and cons