The new wave in our industry "GREEN IT" , is rapidly becoming the IT buzz of the moment. Almost anything you do in computing nowadays needs to under go the green scrutiny. In other to cut cost and save our ecosystem. Recently i went on a computer gadget parade at Soho (down town London west-end), i noticed a gadget that i loved, asked for the price, the store assistant had to check records to confirm the new price is not different from the one on the sticker. I asked why they could not use an electronic price indicator, he answered : "We want to be green".Most people, organization and professionals read meanings to the definition of "GREEN Computing" just like any other computing phrase and jargon, it can mean differently when used in different context. We need to exercise caution when we form our own theories around the "GREEN Computing" word, because wanting to be green should not mean you would disregard what is efficient over what is not. Because you need to be green does not mean you would not provide your customers, staffs with what will make life easier in the workplace and as a product.
Nowadays, every organizations (large and small) are going into green computing foray to utilize resources and energy. The green aspect is to ensure that, there is adequate resources and that project leads/managers/technical leads/architects/business analysts proactively utilizes what is left of them in a cost effective way. Green must ensure resources are maximized and reused accordingly during project development.
What exactly is "GREEN" Computing or IT
Green IT is a computer word that favors efficient production/use of computer resources without any dangerous impacts on our environment. It also mean cutting cost on what we can reuse (It favors Re usability over Recycle - New ). Most computing resources consume a great deal of energy and the cost run into millions to maintain yearly, if we try to be green we can save a lot on environment and cost.
Is That all. No! "GREEN IT" also means
We change our practices, we obey our ethical responsibilities to the society at large. We need to be green before encouraging it. (For example i am green about my spending habbit).
Cloud Computing will take us to the greener pastures
With the Internet becoming so powerful and broadband s are becoming cheaper everyday. It is now wise to take big advantage of the next revolution of our industry, the cloud. Although i can always argue that we are already in the cloud era, right from the 50s and early 60s when the US military used Internet to boost their military operations, and since then, the skies have become the limit, we have experienced the advancing Internet revolution, and within the same era, here come the cloud.
More development should be targeted at the cloud, their is a green advantage on the usage of software systems over the wire compared to conventional run from local system. This approach will reduce cost of installations, cost per head of users and of course the cost of maintaining a server will be taken of you and it will be the responsibilities of the cloud provider. In short cloud computing will take us to the greener pastures.
Now we need GREEN Software Development
Computer hardware does not exist alone, they are produced to complement and supplement the software written by us. You may start to think, that if hardware is useless without a software, that means the software itself consumes resources from the hardware, and the more resources a software consumes the higher the rate of electricity, network packets that the hardware will be forced to use.
To be greener in development, we should try to write code that can be reused across our application domain. We should try and employ domain driven engineering principles (Most organizations write the same code over again because they could not define their domain).
Software as an assets, if you define your domain well, and everything you need are in place and you have a catalogs of domain artifacts assets, this mean your organization is practicing green development.
Get experienced developers to influence the in-experience one, make awareness about the importance of modularizing your components. Use AOP (Aspect Oriented Programming) like you have never done before.
We need to embrace greener coding styles, which will include more focus on software performance, the exploitation of multi threaded and parallel computing. We need to retrain and ensure that software development standards are used to build software and not just delivering crappy software. If we want to be greener in software development approaches, then we have to imbibe the culture of using standards. This will take us back to the days scarce hardware resources.
Green Coding Standards
1. If you are building large tree structure of objects which requires recursion or the visitor pattern, then you will need to cache your output to by pass the same recursion when you require the same output. A slower system makes use of resources.
2. Use design patterns effortlessly. A pragmatic developer would appreciate that common and recurring problems can be solved using a library of knowledge. It is wise for software houses to document that knowledge.
3. Agile developers believes that TDD (Test Driven Development), when practiced to its fullest represents the full specification of a software. In fact TDD believes that tests are the documentation, I am also a strong believer of this. If you make use of scenario based TDD, you will understand that TDD can cover all aspects of your application. If TDD can represent your documentation, why write another bogus documentation wasting paper resources, and re-writing such documentation when something simple changes in own code.
4. Make use of Code Generators, ORM facilities, this will bring you very close to the market place. They are an existing strategies proven to be successful, and reduces code bloat. A good one is this : Rapid Entity Framework.
5. Use Open source : Open source will make you greener and there is no hidden cost the software is completely free to distribute. Open source projects are delivered on time and patches are made on time.
6. Ensure your program does not have bottlenecks. Ensure your code does not take long to achieve its aspect.
7. Be performance aware, an application that consumes resources alot consumes electricity, and so therefore such applications are not green.
We cannot help it, we only develop what works.
Many developers, especially those who are much more around in IT industry today, are more focused on getting faster to the market and during the process, they end up with a product that misses its deadline, a product that is fragile and breaks down every hour, an un-maintainable code base. I can hear some developers already throwing blames at their managers for not allowing them to follow industry standards before software is delivered. Well some managers do not understand (Make them understand and let them know its importance), some managers do understand but their superiors do not understand. These are the problems that IT is facing today.
If we keep focusing on hardware alone in other to be green, then we are half way in reaching the greener pastures. Software development can be green too.
