Software engineering aspects of green and sustainable software: A systematic mapping study

Abstract

Green and sustainable software engineering is an emerging research field which aims at creating, using, and disposing the energy-efficient software in an environment friendly manner with less negative impacts. The research community strongly believes that the energy efficiency and sustainability of the software can be improved by modifying the existing software engineering methods. This systematic mapping study identifies and map such methods for green and sustainable software development. Especially, this study identifies the research types, research goals, software engineering research topics, accepted validation methods and publication fora that are used in the field of green and sustainable software engineering. This study was conducted with 7 research questions and analyzed 82 relevant studies. We have used snowballing reading to find out the relevant studies that were published from 2010 to May, 2016. One of the important finding of this study is, there are less number of contributions on software design and construction. In future, sufficient research works and tools support must be provided to make this research field more matured. The main contribution of this study is to summarize the body of knowledge in the field of green and sustainable software engineering and provides a platform to conduct future research. � 2017 ACM.