According to the 2024 Gartner CEO and Senior Business Executive Survey, over two- thirds (69%) of global CEOs consider sustainability as a significant growth opportunity for their business. Discussing the findings, Gartner highlighted that sustainability is one of the main factors that will “frame competition” and surpass both productivity and efficiency in terms of business priorities for 2024.
However, other research suggests that a significant gap exists between views around sustainability at board level and the actual implementation of enterprise-wide strategies and the tools needed to deploy them. Capgemini’s 2021 Sustainable IT report found that just 43% of executives are aware of their organisation’s IT footprint, while nearly half (49%) lack the tools required to adopt and deploy solutions that will deliver their sustainability goals.
The role of Quality Assurance
One key aspect that is too frequently overlooked yet could significantly impact sustainability when firms develop their products and services is quality assurance (QA). It makes perfect sense if you stop and think about it: inefficient software developed without proper application testing processes will have an environmental cost.
Software testing has the potential to significantly improve resource optimisation and energy consumption. The testing process verifies that applications behave as they should, meet specified requirements, and identify errors and defects to ensure that software is operating at the highest level of efficiency.
For example, by simulating legitimate use cases and real-world scenarios, the testing process enables developers and QA teams to proactively identify inefficiencies that could increase energy consumption before applications go into production.
Removing inefficient code
Identifying the reasons for and impact of inefficient code is another key benefit provided by implementing rigorous software testing. Poor resource management, inadequate memory usage and redundant computations are some of the most common factors.
Such inefficiencies have far-reaching implications, particularly in today’s enterprise environments dominated by cloud computing and distributed systems. Slow execution times, excessive memory consumption, and increased energy usage all lead to an increase in operational costs, present scalability challenges, and negatively impact end-user experiences.
Identifying these issues early on in the application lifecycle and optimising code efficiency will allow developers to minimise resource wastage while also enhancing performance and the overall sustainability of their applications and codebases.
By incorporating test-driven development in this way, emphasising test creation before writing code, developers will have a much clearer understanding of their code’s functionality and expected behaviour from the outset.
Ultimately, this approach creates green code because consistently running tests throughout the development process helps identify and prevent defects early, resulting in cleaner code that is less prone to bugs and easier to maintain over time.
In a practical sense, automating the testing process requires less processing power and fewer resources compared to the traditional and time-intensive process of doing so manually, but it also frees up time, a scarce and valuable resource, for IT teams to dedicate to more critical tasks.
Out with old data
Another critical element to consider is the impact of old, legacy data, which can cause a number of sustainability-related challenges. Too often, and sometimes unknowingly, enterprises hold onto huge volumes of poor-quality, old data, which negatively impacts both application performance and the time taken to produce business-critical reports.
This also directly impacts energy consumption by increasing the amount of energy consumed by devices and machines running the applications. This is where data integrity testing can play a vital role: evaluating legacy data quality to pinpoint any data redundancies and ultimately reduce an organisation’s carbon footprint.
If sustainability is to truly deliver the impact business leaders predict and demand, then meeting sustainable goals must start with an in-depth look at IT operations through a quality assurance lens. There is a direct link between software testing and successfully delivering on sustainability pledges, which can no longer be overlooked or ignored.
- Digital Strategy
- Sustainability Technology
