Often people think that coding and testing themselves don’t really contribute to the stress to climate. Rather people think it is the use of information systems that has an impact on the climate. It is true that it is easier to start moving cloud provider data centers to use renewable energy. However, also coding and testing can create a positive carbon handprint, which means influencing the information system's ecological attributes in a climate-positive manner.
When you code, you can make architectural choices that end up using less energy when they are executed in the cloud. When you aim for early quality, the need to fix software diminishes, the cost per fixed defect diminishes, and as a consequence, the hours of test environment used during software development and testing diminish, too. As always, it pays back to create good quality, because as a total cost, good quality is cheaper. Early quality is even cheaper. Cheaper means also less energy used. So, it makes sense to create software through agile software development processes and early testing, because then you need fewer test environments.
Of course, you still need many environments for testing, but when they are implemented and installed through on-demand automation, there’s less carbon footprint.
The presentation provides depths into these considerations and challenges the audience to think in which ways testing can contribute positively to climate. The talk encourages to optimize the number of tests by using risk analysis techniques, test techniques, and AI-based test optimization, both for first time tests and for regression tests. The talk encourages to creation of on-demand test environments instead of all-the-time powered-up old and cumbersome environments.
Key Takeaways:- ICT, and testing too, is in a great place to help battle the climate impact of CO2 emissions
- Testing can also check the environmental friendliness of software among other quality criteria
- Green testing means early and optimized test environments and testing, which means cheaper testing!
