Building a more responsible digital future

Join us and our colleague Emanuel Gaytant, Program Manager Social Impact, as we explore how Cegeka is building a more responsible digital world through its green software development approach.

What is green software development?

Green software development is the practice of designing, building, and running software in a way that minimizes its environmental impact. It emphasizes energy efficiency, resource optimization, and sustainable design choices throughout the software lifecycle.

In contrast, non-green software development often overlooks energy consumption, leading to bloated applications, inefficient code, and unnecessary hardware usage- all of which contribute to higher emissions and, ultimately, environmental degradation over time.

Cegeka’s ambition: Sustainable software

At Cegeka, we believe that sustainable software is smart software. Since software drives hardware, there is no green IT without energy-efficient applications. That’s why we are actively exploring how to embed sustainability into every phase of the software lifecycle: design, build, and run.

While green software development is still an emerging practice within Cegeka, we are building on a strong foundation: agile working and craftmanship are deeply embedded in our culture, and they provide a natural starting point for integrating sustainability into our way of working.

Our ambition is to reduce carbon emissions by making our software more energy-efficient, without compromising performance or user experience.

Our foundation: Agility and craftsmanship

When applied thoughtfully, agile practices can also support sustainability goals, both environmental and social. The agile workflow provides us with a structure that aligns with sustainable development principles in several ways.

• Iterative improvement reduces waste.
  Frequent iterations (e.g., 2-week sprints) allow teams to adapt quickly. This reduces the risk of building unnecessary features or products, minimizing resource waste (time, energy, and materials).
• Continuous feedback promotes responsible development.
  Sprint reviews and retrospectives encourage regular reflection. These checkpoints encourage reflection and course correction, which can include environmental or social impact considerations (e.g., reducing server load, improving accessibility).
• Flexibility enables sustainable choices.
  The product backlog can be adjusted to prioritize features that support sustainability goals, such as energy-efficient algorithms.
• Empowered teams foster a culture of responsibility.
  Daily scrums and cross-functional collaboration promote shared ownership. This helps teams stay mindful of the broader impact of their work.
• Exploratory testing supports quality and longevity
  Testing at the end of each sprint ensures robust, reliable products. This reduces the need for frequent rework or replacement.

We are now extending agile principles to include green thinking, inspired by emerging practices such as:

• sustainable sprint planning and green user stories;
• green CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-aware DevOps;
• environmental awareness in retrospectives and team culture.

In parallel, we apply software craftsmanship principles to ensure performance and efficiency:

• performance and load testing to detect and resolve bottlenecks;
• constraint-based development to avoid overengineering;
• refactoring, clean code, and proper error handling to reduce waste;
• atomic methods/functions and the single responsibility principle to ensure modular, efficient code;
• optimizing existing infrastructure instead of defaulting to scaling with more hardware.

Responsible innovation with AI

At Cegeka, we believe that emergent technologies like AI should be both intelligent and sustainable. That’s why we embrace the power of AI with a responsible and ethical mindset.

As a signatory of the Microsoft Partner Pledge, Cegeka actively promotes the responsible development and use of AI aligned with principles of fairness and accountability. As part of this process, we commit to:

• Running AI systems in green data centers.
• Choosing energy-efficient AI models.
• Using AI for the right purpose and only where it adds real value.

Even though we’re just getting started, Cegeka’s aim is to infuse AI into more applications intelligently and sustainably.

From strategy to code: Sustainability by design

While agile and craftsmanship-driven development provide the foundation for sustainable software, true impact requires alignment with broader business goals. That’s why we are extending our focus beyond the development process itself toward embedding sustainability into our clients’ digital strategies. Where possible, we help our clients to:

• Innovate their business models with lower environmental impact;
• Simplify and digitize business processes (e.g. go paperless, eliminate unnecessary steps) to reduce waste and use of energy;
• Integrate sustainability as a non-functional requirement (NFR) from the start.
  

This mindset extends into architecture and design, where we make deliberate, sustainability-driven choices about technology, infrastructure, and system behavior to reduce energy consumption and improve efficiency. For example, we explore advanced techniques such as native image builds (ahead-of-time compilation) to lower runtime energy usage.

We also evaluate the energy efficiency of programming languages and frameworks as part of our technology selection process, ensuring that performance aligns with environmental impact.

Measurement

We are gradually integrating sustainability metrics into our development lifecycle. While we don’t measure everything yet, we are already using tools that provide valuable insights:

• cloud-native tools from AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud to estimate application-level carbon footprints
• CAST for identifying inefficient code
• SonarQube with EcoCode plugins to assess code greenness
• Kepler for energy monitoring in Kubernetes environments

That said, carbon calculation logic (CCL) is still maturing. Providers use different methodologies, and most tools have only been available for 3-4 years. There is also a lack of specific and robust data, which makes consistent measurement a challenge.

Despite this, we believe in progress over perfection. Measuring what we can today helps us make better decisions and continuously improve.

Learning from the community

We are not alone on this journey. By attending events like the GreenTech Forum, we stay informed, see real-world examples, and connect with others who are also working toward sustainable digital practices.

We also benefit from the expertise of our daughter company NSI, a member of ISIT (Institut du Numérique Responsable). This collaboration strengthens our collective knowledge and accelerates our progress toward greener software.

And this is just the beginning. At Cegeka, we will continue to explore ways to shape a digital future that respects our planet, one line of code at a time.