How to measure the maturity of green software practices
GreenGauge is a new open-source tool developed by the team at Kainos. GreenGauge enables others to rate the maturity of their green software practices. Allowing them to better identify things they might change to reduce the carbon impact of software.
What is it?
In the context of green software, figuring out what to put into practice can be tricky. Talking about the theory of change tends to be easier, which somewhat explains the many opinion pieces [including our own] on this topic. However, there is a very real gap between the theory and the practical application of this knowledge in helping software builders to deliver real change.
It was in trying to tackle this problem that our teams developed GreenGauge, and now we’re making it available for everyone. It utilises a familiar CMMI approach to rate the maturity of green software practices on a scale of 1(bad) to 5(excellent) across 91 different things - everything from architecture to service design.
The idea is that people and teams can quickly self-assess against this, figure out where they are today and generate ideas to move forward.
Why create it?
If you set yourself the challenge of changing one thing within your teams to better embed green software practices, what would you change today? What about tomorrow? And next week? The month after? How would you benchmark the impact of this over time? It also turns out there is much more to creating greener software than software engineering..
In a recent blog post on calculating carbon emissions for our Smart Test product, we explained how we calculated the carbon equivalency [using the Software Carbon Intensity(SCI) Specification] for each test transaction to approximately 0.27gCO2e. But is this number good or bad?
Our team realised it was neither. What matters is how that number moves over time based on the things we change.
- If it goes up: It's bad
- If it goes down: It's good
- If it remains constant: It’s somewhere in the middle
Over the timespan of days, weeks, months and years how might you monitor your progress over time? GreenGauge provides a mechanism to first benchmark your practices today, track how maturity develops over time and relate this to measures you might have including SCI.
How can I use it?
Apply GreenGauge to benchmark your teams’ practices today and use insights from this to provoke conversations around changes you might wish to make.
We've included a scoring assessment template (excel format) so you can quickly self-evaluate against and visualise the results. Optimistically, we'd like to think it will take you no longer than 30mins to complete…but realistically if you’re doing it as a team it might take an hour or two.
Having done this, identify some things you'd like to experiment with in the next 3 months.
Repeat the benchmark every 3 months to see how things have changed.
Contributing / Providing feedback:
We'll undoubtedly have got some things wrong or missed others entirely. Raise an issue on GitHub pointing this out for us to resolve or for extra points, submit a PR with suggested changes included.