Sustainable Software Engineering: Integrating Environmental Considerations in Software Development

As the software industry flourishes, it plays an active role in contributing a big share of energy consumed by the world and emitted into the atmosphere, where it is often left to one side in software engineering processes. This research provides methods for incorporating environmental factors through the software development life cycle (SDLC) to make software engineering practice more sustainable. A systematic literature review, case studies of the leading industries, and experimental tests on energy-efficient coding practices. Our findings highlight that the energy usage associated with software products could be reduced by up to 30% without loss of functionality through optimization of algorithms, utilization of resources, and dynamic scaling. Main challenges include the fact that there is no unified scale of metrics and, importantly, the awareness levels about this issue are also really low among developers. This research lays the foundations of green computing by making practical recommendations and guidelines about the design of environmentally friendly software. Our results speak of the strategic importance that sustainability holds in software development and call for further industry take-up and empirical research.