Inculcating Green coding practices and patterns with the development team is a modern-day challenge. It can go a long way to reducing the carbon footprints and long-term sustainable goals of an organization.
Good Green coding practices improve the quality of the software application and directly impact the energy efficiency on which the software applications are running. However, the software developers of today's agile work environment seldom focus away from rapid solution building in reduced sprint cycles. They have all the modern frameworks and libraries at their behest, and writing energy-efficient code is not always the focus. Furthermore, modern data centers and cloud infrastructure provide developers with unlimited resources resulting in high energy consumption and impacting the environment.
Below are some of the factors that improve the programming practices and can show a drastic impact on the Green Index
a) Fundamental Programming Practices
Some of the fundamental programming practices start with proper Error and Exception handling. It also includes paying extra attention to the modularity and structure of the code and being prepared for unexpected deviation and behavior, especially when integrating with a different component or system.
b) Efficient Code Development
Efficient code development helps to make the code more readable and maintainable. Efficient code writing includes avoiding memory leaks, high CPU cycles, and managing network and Infrasturc Storage in a proficient manner. It also includes avoiding expensive calls and unnecessary loops, and eliminating unessential operations.
c) Secured Programming Mindset
A secured programming mindset ensures that the software application has no weak security features or vulnerabilities. Secured programming also includes protecting data, data encoding, and encryption. OWASP vulnerability list awareness and performing timely Penetration testing assessments ensure the application code is compliant with the required level of security.
d) Avoidance of Complexity
A complex code is the least modified and the hardest to follow. A piece of code developed may in the future be modified by several different developers, and hence avoiding complexity when writing code can go a long way to keep the code maintainable. Reducing the cyclomatic complexity of the methods by dividing the code and logic into smaller reusable components helps the code to remain simple and easy to understand.
e) Clean Architecture concepts
Understanding Clean Architecture concepts is essential to allow changes to the codebases. In a layered architecture, understanding the concerns of tight coupling and weak cohesion helps in reusability, minimal disruption to changes, and avoids rewriting code and capabilities.
Conclusion
As Architects and developers, it is essential to collect Green metrics on a timely basis and evaluate the compliance and violations of the code. Measuring these coding practices can be done using various static code analysis tools. The tools can further be integrated into the IDE, at the code compilation or deployment layer, or even as a standalone tool.
With organizations in several industries now focusing on individual sustainability goals, green coding practices have become an integral part of every software developer. The little tweaks to our development approach can immensely contribute to the environmental impact in the long run.