Sustainable software engineering—A contribution puzzle of different teams in large IT organizations

Abstract

IT sustainability is becoming more and more important within the digitalization journey. It is more than green coding or the usage of power-efficient hardware – it needs a holistic approach to leverage the potentials end-to-end in the software life-cycle. The overall value stream within the IT organization is subject to sustainability alignment. This holistic alignment demands the engagement of different teams in large IT organizations. This article identifies the contributions of typical team stakeholders and evaluates their sustainability software engineering (SSE) contributions. This includes demand, architecture, design, implementation, operation, and usage. As an IT organization focuses on more than just software, the term sustainable IT engineering (SIE) fits better with the scope of organizational sustainability. The proposed approaches are presented based on instantiations within the Volkswagen Group IT.