Over the last couple of weeks, there have been a lot of references to the meeting at the UN in New York addressing Climate Change. Has Quality Assurance anything to add to this or is it something that is peripheral to our work? Quality Assurance is Green. It can be argued that anything that reduces rework or ensures that something is right in the first place reduces energy consumption and thus reduces the climate change.
With reference to some of the earlier posts we have put up, Quality Assurance cuts the failure rate and reduces the length of the process used to generate a product or provide a service. This cuts the amount of energy use – see Energy Use in Data Centres.
There is a number of ways in which Quality Assurance can help:
- Reduce the amount of storage required thus reducing disk space; the number of disks and the amount of cooling.
- Reduce the length of any process reduces CPU utilisation and thus the number or power of the CPUs and the amount of cooling.
- Remove or rationalise any redundant processes with the same impact as above.
In general, anything that is simpler yet still correct will lessen the impact on the power used and the climate change.
So far we have concentrated on the power aspects of running systems and servers to support the industry. However, Quality Assurance can also help in checking other parts of the process unrelated to software to be more efficient. This may reduce the need for resources or allow reuse in some way that will again reduce the carbon footprint or that of other uses that impact climate change.