Reducing your carbon emissions with Kainos Smart Test
Businesses are often guided to make strategic decisions based on long term-planning, ROI or market conditions. However, with environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) now a priority for leaders, employees and consumers, it is important for businesses to understand how their values fit into these decisions and how they can drive ROI more sustainably.
Climate change and sustainability is one critical area, requiring urgent and meaningful action from businesses of all sizes, across all industries. Often sustainability is focused on tackling the obvious challenges; reducing paper use, making properties more efficient or offsetting carbon emissions. The results is ever-expanding sustainability strategies that often miss their long-term goals.
By utilising automated technologies, like Workday and Kainos Smart Test, to improve efficiency and reduce waste, businesses can ensure that their sustainability and growth goals are met.
Efficient testing is a key sustainability pillar
The testing of core systems, like Workday, is necessary to ensure that updates, new functionality and new business processes do not adversely affect your configuration. An unintended and often-overlooked consequence of rigorous manual testing is the resulting carbon emissions. Automated, cloud-based solutions can help to minimise emissions and still maximise test coverage.
Manual testing requires large teams, often working long hours to reach the minimum level of test coverage required.
The office space required, and equipment used all contribute to carbon emissions, with the production and shipping of computer equipment alone creating a massive environmental impact.
With organisations often employing large testing teams, and these teams growing as Workday configurations become more complex, manual regression testing is not environmentally sustainable. Smart Test allows users to reduce their overall testing effort by 80%, while increasing test coverage. By limiting the manual input required during this process, businesses can create a more sustainable approach to Workday testing.
Good for business, good for the planet
Using a managed, automated test solution like Smart Test can reduce Workday testing emissions by an estimated 85% compared to a team of 6 conducting manual testing. For larger teams, the reductions will be even more significant.
By utilising a shared cloud architecture to maximise efficiency and minimise resource requirements, Smart Test carries out more tests, with less impact. Smart Test has been optimised to emit just 0.27 gCO2e per test executed 1. For context an hour of video streaming produces over 100 times more carbon emissions.
This cloud-based approach means Smart Test is able conduct more tests, in less time and still align with sustainable values. This gives customers confidence that Smart Test is a responsible and sustainable solution that can help contribute to Net Zero goals, allowing customers to use these calculations in their own Scope 3 carbon emissions reporting.
The sustainability impacts of Kainos Smart Test vs. manual testing
Manual testing
6-12
90%
28-60 kg
Emissions
Kainos Smart Test
80%
30%
4 kg
Emissions
As corporations continue to prioritise net-zero goals, digital sustainability is becoming an increasingly important ESG pillar. This is why Kainos has made a Green Software Commitment to its customers and invested to optimise Smart Test to set a new standard for responsible Workday apps. Kainos Smart solutions help you reduce effort, increase accuracy and reduce carbon emissions to make a positive change, for your business and the future.
How did we calculate this?
Smart Test emissions were calculated using the Green Software Foundation's Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) specification. This calculates based on both product usage and embodied carbon emissions for Kainos servers.
Using their knowledge of AWS, Kainos Cloud Engineers worked out other contributory factors. This included the different carbon emissions for the AWS regions Smart is deployed in, using government conversation factors for the carbon intensity of the electricity grid in these regions.
We also used the Climatiq climate dataset for other conversation factors to move from utilisation to carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e). Additionally, resources used by Kainos teams such as the laptops used for the Smart Gold managed service, were included in the calculation.
For the manual testing process we also used the SCI process to calculate embodied carbon emissions and energy use emissions showing 28-30 kgCO2e per month with a typical customer setup assuming:
- Testing team of six - smaller than many of our customer test teams.
- Embodied carbon for HP Elitebook laptop - 215kgCO2e. We pro-rated this for a month of testing.
- Energy use for a typical laptop - 0.055 kgCO2e per day. This is lower than some manufacturer figures and includes sleep and idle time. Desktops with screens use substantially more energy.
- Manual testing in Germany (305 gCO2/kWh) and the United States (555 gCO2/kWh). This will differ per country/state but is a smaller factor than embodied carbon.
Kainos has been testing Workday since becoming a Workday partner in 2011. Smart Test was launched in 2014 and today is trusted by 400+ customers worldwide. It is the market-leading dedicated testing product built exclusively for use with Workday.