Climate impact of software testing

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 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 in regards, the need to fix software diminishes, the cost per fixed defect diminishes, and as a consequence, the hours of test environment use 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 less 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.