Pretending to be green and not explicitly measuring it

Last year I already introduced on my blog "Ecoliability" as a potential new quality attribute. I still believe this quality attribute can be of use to explicitly measure how "Green" a company or software is.

On CeBIT green IT a entire hall was dedicated to innovations related to energy saving solutions in the IT-world. Looking at this site it seems those solutions are for a wide scale of potions, from efficient usage of processor time through cloud-computing or SaaS till hard ware solutions to save energy.

If organizations pretending or intending to be green; why not explicitly measure this? Most of the software testers like to talk about quality attributes when they need to test something. It is common knowledge that if certain quality attributes getting more attention in projects it have a positive influence on some attributes and a negative influence on others. For example increasing functionality could have positive effects on usability and efficiency only the sustainability and portability might be lesser.

Management make decisions on those effects. If this is so important for management to decide what to choose based on the impact on certain quality attributes this new quality attribute "Ecoliability" can also be of use and must be introduced.

If we start using this quality attribute it can help management to decide if they accept the costs on other attributes for being "Green" or forcing projects to look for other solutions. If being "Green" is a management decision based on a company’s vision we should help them making it measurable and therefore visible.

If you are "Green" you might think about this and start discussions about this new attribute.