Building Sustainable Software for Sustainable Systems: Case Study of a Shared Pick-Up and Delivery Service

Sustainability has become a major concern of the 21st century. With the digital revolution, ICT is actually part of both the problem and the solution. Despite this, sustainability-related design decisions are often left implicit and result from a process involving synergies and trade-offs among many non-functional requirements, including some constraints related to the software development and operation itself. The purpose of this paper is to identify such decisions and analyse the process that resulted into them based on a real-world industrial case with strong sustainability goals: a shared pick-up and delivery service. We also show how available methods for green software engineering help in better shaping this process and highlight some interesting lessons learned from our experience.