Standards for sustainable software – when will the norm come?

[suchona.kani.z]

Standards and norms trigger mixed feelings in many people. The terms sound dry, sluggish and suggest little room for maneuver. And especially when it comes to time-critical challenges - such as combating climate change - bureaucratized processes do not initially seem to be the method of choice. But as long as it is a matter of voluntary commitment, uniform requirements can provide orientation and security. In the specific case of sustainability, they can also help to avoid greenwashing. In my blog post, I look at how the industry is making progress in establishing a standard and which aspects of digital sustainability are being discussed.

Do we need more standards?
In terms of sustainability, this is highly likely. Standards do not necessarily mean regulations and certainly not coercion. In my blog post on digital sustainability, I showed how important sustainability is in the context of digitalization. And when developing accessibility as an aspect of usability, it was shown that standardization can have positive effects. Since ireland consumer email list accessibility was included in ISO 25010 in 2002, many companies in the market have taken this as a guide. Google awards poorer page rankings if content and pages are not accessible, and many public tenders require accessibility as a criterion for new developments. Classic examples such as the nine percent of all men with red-green color blindness or twelve percent of functional illiterates in Germany have led to socially relevant topics being given appropriate frameworks that those responsible can use as a guide. We as a society and especially future generations are at least as affected by the environmental impacts of digital solutions, which is why committed actors are trying to propose a framework for action for digital sustainability.

Fortunately, there are many committed people in the field, and naming them all would go beyond the scope of this blog post. However, I would like to give you a rough overview of which approaches are promising and which could possibly help shape a future standard. In the following sections, some catalogues of criteria and frameworks for digital sustainability are therefore presented. The list is by no means complete and there are dozens of complementary approaches, especially in the academic environment.