World Quality Report 2022-2023: How can quality engineering guide the progress of green IT?

Few discussions on enterprise IT nowadays can ignore the topic of sustainability. Sustainable (or ‘green’) IT has been evolving for several decades but with the accelerating climate crisis, it is now firmly embedded in core sustainability strategies. Green IT is developing both as an enabler of broader sustainability ambitions and with a focus on how to limit the carbon footprint of the technology itself.

Where does quality engineering (QE) sit in this evolving picture? The World Quality Report (WQR) delves into how organizations are connecting QE and green IT and asks whether the potential contribution of quality engineering to sustainability has been given enough strategic consideration.

Brand value and customer loyalty

The WQR survey respondents cited improved brand value, customer loyalty, supplier loyalty and total revenue as the most important benefits of embedding green quality engineering within a broader sustainable IT program.

So how do teams test for sustainability? It seems that there is a somewhat sporadic approach and a fairly flat line in terms of the frequency of testing for sustainability attributes: Energy efficiency (54.4%), resource efficiency (54.0%), usability (53%), performance efficiency (52.8%), and modularity/reusability (52.4%).

Only 53.4% of the survey respondents said that the tools and methods required for sustainable development and test activities were sufficient and available. While only 54.1% said their sustainability requirements were clearly defined. Clearly, there is some way to go before this aspect of quality engineering reaches maturity.

Beginning with tactical short-term benefits

On a more positive note, there is no doubt that tactical benefits can accrue when quality engineering is applied to sustainable IT. The WQR survey respondents cited the utilization of cloud for test environments, and optimizing test cases, data, and scripts as the top two short-term tactical benefits. At the bottom end of the scale, only 24% of respondents ranked ‘checking performance and customer experience’ as a tactical benefit. Interestingly, this low ranking differs from the less tangible business benefits cited earlier (brand value, customer loyalty, etc.).

The WQR suggests that this divergence between the tactical and business benefits might be because organizations are still working out how quality engineering fits into sustainable IT in the long term. There is still some ways to go but organizations can achieve higher adoption by utilizing Quality Engineering frameworks, tools and maturity models to consistently drive sustainability targets.

The WQR also clearly calls out that a higher quality ensures less wastage of resources and increased efficiencies. This has always been a keystone focus of Quality as a discipline. From a broader perspective, any organization focusing on sustainable practices while running their business cannot do so without a strong focus on quality. Simply put, there is no sustainability without quality!

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