Measuring the Sustainability Performance of Software Projects

Contrary to the common assumption that software is "environmentally friendly" simply because it is virtual, the processes and methods used to develop, maintain and deploy software do have an environmental and social impact that is normally not accounted for by software development practices. For example, e-waste could be greatly minimized if software vendors would take into consideration the lifetime of old hardware. Like so, software that is dependable minimizes waste of resources used to support the system. This paper introduces a set of software engineering metrics that can be used to assess the economic, social and environmental sustainability of software projects, and it demonstrates how these metrics were used to assess a real project.