Sustainability in tech? You'll want to start looking at Sustainable NFR's

How often have you looked into requirement document with tens of pages for functional requirements - and almost nothing for Non-Functional requirements (NFRs)?🙂

Well - if companies want to make sure their tech is sustainable, they will want to start paying more attention to NFRs - specifically sustainable NFRs.

Here are my thoughts on how Sustainability NFRs can help companies see how sustainable their tech practices truly are:

Glossary:

NFR - Non Functional Requirement that define and specify constraints or conditions that a system must meet that are not related to functional requirements or behaviours.

Sustainability - practices or initiatives to reduce the consumption of natural resources - by ensuring the systems are designed, developed, tested and operated with social and environmental responsibility.

1. Material Usage: The use of materials that make-up the system being used.

   1. Report on material substance. i.e. 40% of a server is made with recyclable materials, 15% with materials that need to be treated, 45% recyclable.

   2. Output: Incorporate the recyclable factors into a decommission report and submit that into a central team to ensure all materials have been treated/recycled.

2. Energy Efficiency: The efficiency rating of a system to use minimal energy and reduce its carbon footprint. How the system has been designed to use minimal energy, how it interacts with resources to deliver an output.

3. Energy per user journey: To perform a journey, how much energy is needed per request? This works in a number of ways:

   1. You can surface this information to the user to observe how users behave with this information.

   2. You can identify how much energy is needed for your most frequent requests and see how you can optimise these journeys.

   3. You can estimate how much energy new features will consume and be able to have a baseline of energy consumption. This can then be used against fluctuating energy rates to assist with forecasting.

4. Social Responsibility: Incorporate requirements linked to labour practices, human rights, SDGs. This NFR can be subjective and timely to analyse, but has the opportunity to lead to the most impactful change. i.e. analysing workloads that are running in a data centre in South Asia - will likely not be using renewable energy due to the nature of the energy market. How will this affect your decision to have workloads running in South Asia. What will be the framework to assess how, where and when workloads are executed?

By considering the NFRs from a sustainability point of view, we can work towards designing, developing and operating in a responsible and sustainable manner. This will benefit both the environment, the society, the economy and the clients sustainable approach.

How soon until NFR’s become a measuring tool for regulators to assess a companies improvement?