What are the most effective ways to promote sustainability in agile application development?

1 Define sustainability goals

One of the first steps to promote sustainability in agile application development is to define clear and measurable sustainability goals for your project or product. These goals should align with the vision, mission, and values of your organization, as well as with the expectations and needs of your customers and users. Sustainability goals can cover different dimensions, such as environmental impact, social responsibility, user satisfaction, technical quality, business value, and legal compliance. You can use frameworks such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Triple Bottom Line (TBL), or the Sustainability Hexagon to guide your goal-setting process. By defining sustainability goals, you can communicate your intentions, prioritize your actions, and evaluate your progress.

2 Apply agile principles and values

Another way to promote sustainability in agile application development is to apply the principles and values of agile methodologies to your work. Agile methodologies are based on four core values: individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation, and responding to change over following a plan. These values support sustainability by fostering a culture of collaboration, feedback, learning, and adaptation, as well as by focusing on delivering value and satisfying customers. Moreover, agile methodologies follow 12 principles that guide the behavior and practices of agile teams. Some of these principles are directly related to sustainability, such as delivering working software frequently, ensuring technical excellence, reflecting and improving continuously, and embracing changing requirements.

3 Adopt sustainable practices

A third way to promote sustainability in agile application development is to adopt sustainable practices that can help you reach your sustainability objectives and implement your agile principles and values. Sustainable practices are specific techniques, tools, or methods that can raise the quality, performance, or impact of your software products or processes. For instance, test-driven development (TDD) involves writing automated tests before writing the code that implements the functionality, ensuring that the code meets the requirements and reduces defects. Refactoring is a practice that improves the structure, design, or readability of the code without changing its behavior, enhancing its maintainability and extensibility. Continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) are practices that automate the building, testing, and deployment of the software, ensuring its reliability and availability. User stories express the requirements of the software as short descriptions of what the user wants to achieve, ensuring that the software meets user needs and expectations. Finally, sprint reviews and retrospectives involve gathering feedback from customers, stakeholders, and team members at the end of each iteration, ensuring that the software delivers value and that the team learns and improves.

4 Engage stakeholders and users

A fourth way to promote sustainability in agile application development is to engage stakeholders and users throughout the software development lifecycle. Stakeholders and users are the people who have an interest, influence, or impact on the software product or project, such as customers, sponsors, managers, developers, testers, designers, or end-users. Engaging stakeholders and users means involving them in the planning, design, development, testing, delivery, and evaluation of the software, ensuring that their perspectives, opinions, and feedback are considered and incorporated. By engaging stakeholders and users, you can increase their satisfaction, trust, and loyalty, as well as their awareness and commitment to sustainability. You can use various techniques to engage stakeholders and users, such as interviews, surveys, focus groups, workshops, prototyping, usability testing, or user feedback sessions.

5 Monitor and measure sustainability

A fifth way to promote sustainability in agile application development is to monitor and measure sustainability throughout the software development lifecycle. Monitoring and measuring sustainability means collecting, analyzing, and reporting data and information that can indicate the performance and impact of the software product or project in relation to the sustainability goals. By monitoring and measuring sustainability, you can track your progress, identify your strengths and weaknesses, and make informed decisions and adjustments. You can use various indicators and metrics to monitor and measure sustainability, such as carbon footprint, energy consumption, user satisfaction, defect rate, business value, or compliance rate.