A methodology to derive sustainability indicators for software development projects

The ever-increasing pervasiveness of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) not only is determining radical changes in everyone’s life-style, in the social organizations, and in the economic dynamics, but it is causing relevant direct and indirect effects on the environment as well. One of the aspects not yet sufficiently addressed in literature is the sustainability of the software lifecycle. In this paper, we focus on the sustainability management of software development projects. In the practice, software development projects are managed by considering principally parameters as time, costs and quality of work products. We propose a methodological approach aimed at identifying sustainability indicators to be used in project management to set up sustainability objectives for a software development project, to control their achievement during the project itself and, possibly, to adopt corrective actions to maintain the project aligned with them. The availability of such sustainability indicators may contribute to reduce the carbon footprint of the activities performed in software development projects as well as to speed-up the development of a green culture in organizations developing software.