Integrating Environmental Sustainability in Software Product Quality

Recently, sustainability in software engineering and especially in requirements engineering is an emerging field. Especially, increasing demand for energy and intensive use of software and software-related services are the key motivators for designing software products with environmental requirements. In this study, we identify the software practitioners perception of the energy-related impact of software quality in order to develop environmentally sustainable software product. We present the result of a survey study that is conducted with 53 software practitioners in 7 different companies. Through this survey, we aim to explore the correlation between software quality and energy efficiency. We found out that there are significant negative correlations between functional suitability and compatibility; performance efficiency and security; reliability and compatibility with respect to energy efficiency. We built regression models by using energy efficiency and resource efficiency. Regression models show that performance efficiency, reliability and usability attributes have significant energy-related impact on the quality of the environmentally sustainable software product. We believe that our analysis gives insights to software practitioners to consider energy efficiency in making requirements prioritization decisions.