CIRCULAR ECONOMY-NEW MANTRA OF TECH SUSTAINABILITY

Traditionally, engineering teams suppose to automate what they can and try to reduce their cycle time from concept to cash towards an excellent Digital Transformation Journey.

Not many organisations got it right in reality- 70% of Digital Transformation fail in which 59% struggle to migrate from legacy to modern infrastructures!

Hence making successful digital transformation by sustainable optimization leads to maintainable software. But it comes with a cost! So facilitating such transformation with greater re-usability i.e circularity leads to green future.

CIRCULAR ECONOMY

Circular Economy in Technology is nothing but a greater re-usability and share ability to get application, tool and code longevity in expanding productivity while reducing the e-waste such as CO2 emission. Teams that are cross-pollinating technologies through inner sourcing leads to higher cost efficiency.

In Ethiopia, UNIDO and other international organizations worked with the government to design an e-waste strategy. The new strategy promotes the sound management of e-waste, secure handling of non-recyclable materials, and the highest possible recovery rate

Source: Link

If engineers are focusing towards sustainable code, it won't be an overnight re-deployment of code to Jenkins. It takes its own time through tech debts.

But Tech Debt is increasing day by day in which tech-reusability is the only way forward to make a successful digital transformation:

Source: Tech debt: Reclaiming tech equity | McKinsey

USE OF GENERATIVE AI

Adapting Circular Economy and Sustainability through Technology Space need some basic use cases to improve backlog's health in agile engineering teams. In this context, I have approached GenAI to develop some open source test cases for me to adapt #TechSustainability

Artificial Intelligence is a key enabler and using AI towards sustainability is a great use case to get the direction right on a reusable sustainable code.

Please feel free to clone, fork and star the repository from GitHub:

Tech Sustainability Tests

This repository consists of 30 use cases in which tech sustainability can be implemented in any given digital transformation projects and all these tests are written with the help of Gen AI ChatGPT!

Let us look at some of the specifics on technology development domain such as #Security, #Accessibility and sector based implementations such as #BankingAndFinance to enable Sustainability.

Circular Economy Ambition: Reduce e-waste by enhancing AI to adapt sustainability

SUSTAINABILITY THROUGH APPLICATION SECURITY

Application's Security helps building sustainable community products and services with reduced limitations and downtime to key applications.

In my experience, enabling plugins through BurpSuite Professional, a famous DAST tool (for Dynamic Application Security Testing) will help in-house capability in testing web applications and microservices and enable greater circularity among engineering teams.

These are some of the top plugins available from BApp Store - PortSwigger

1. Additional Scanner

2. J2EE

3. CSP Bypass

4. Software version reporter

5. Software vulnerability scanner

6. CSRF scanner

Measuring #reduction in security violations will help facilitating a sustainable service to application users and that leads to a greater future with increased customer usage.

Circular Economy Ambition: Reduce application and service downtime by facilitating sustainable software.

SUSTAINABILITY THROUGH INCREASED DIGITAL ACCESSIBILITY

According to World Bank’s report, 15% of world population lives with disability. There are over 2 million people in the UK living with sight loss. 340,000 people are registered blind or partially sighted in the UK.

Hence facilitating #inclusive digital applications to reduce inequalities will help leading to sustainable future.

🎬 Meanwhile Discover the Power of Accessible Technology with Apple's Short Film: The Greatest  (External Youtube Link-sourced from IAAP's Linkedin post)

In Case You Missed It: Apple's short film, "The Greatest," brilliantly captures the indispensable role of accessible technology in the daily lives of individuals with disabilities. This two-minute video not only stars people with disabilities but was also created by them, showcasing their remarkable stories and the transformative impact of Apple's accessible features.

The video provides a vivid glimpse into how individuals use Apple devices such as smartphones, watches, and tablets to accomplish far more than conventional tasks. It highlights innovative features like Assistive Touch, Door Detection, Sound Recognition notifications, and Speak Selection.

 Through their experiences, the film underscores the boundless potential of accessible technologies and Apple's steadfast dedication to inclusivity.

To ensure inclusivity extends further, Apple released an audio-described version of the film, catering to the needs of blind and low-vision audiences

 The Greatest | Apple - YouTube

Neuro Diversity Spectrum

ADHD, Autism, Dyslexia are the key limitations in which users engage through #SpeechToText mechanism for a device interaction across mobile, tablet and laptops.

According to What is Neurodiversity - ADHD Aware Charity,

• ~8% of people in the UK are thought to have ADHD.

• ~10% of people in the UK are thought to have dyslexia.

• ~8% of people in the UK are thought to have dyspraxia.

• ~6% of people in the UK are thought to have dyscalculia.

• ~1% of people in the UK are thought to have an autistic spectrum condition.

• ~1% of people in the UK are thought to have Tourette's syndrome.

Cerebral Palsy

Approximately 160,000 people have cerebral palsy in the UK (130,000 adults and 30,000 children), a similar population to multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease.

Reference: Impact | CP Sport | Cerebral Palsy Sport

Idea Generation Techniques for supporting users with cerebral palsy on mobile usage:

1. Writing Test Case for Dwell feature in iOS to empathise with users of Cerebral Palsy background

2. Writing Test Case for Direct Touch feature in iOS to empathise with users of Cerebral Palsy background

3. Writing Test Case for Accessibility-Sound (Sound to Action) to empathise with users of Cerebral Palsy background.

Meanwhile, I have generated list of tests with the help of GenAI (ChatGPT) and put together in GitHub -please feel free to clone and make use of it:

Refer one of the best video to adapt device settings to enable #SoundToAction:

Some more examples:

Assuming Ability (with Audio Descriptions) - YouTube

Even cerebral palsy can't stop this dedicated video creator | Engadget

Recommended Books:

Circular Economy Ambition: Increase Accessibility in greater circularity to appreciate inclusion and reduce inequalities (SDG no.10)

SUSTAINABILITY IN FINANCE DOMAIN

Sustainability in banking and finance refers to the integration of sustainable practices in the digital banking across leading financial institutions:

• Resource efficiency: Sustainable software engineering practices aim to reduce waste and optimise the use of resources such as inner sourced tools and technologies. This can be achieved through initiatives such as waste reduction, energy efficiency, and the use of contemporary APIs

• Clean energy: Sustainable software engineering also involves the use of optimised energy sources such as enhanced battery, memory, CPU to power application processes.

• Circular economy: Sustainable software engineering also involves the implementation of circular economy principles, such as recycling, remanufacturing, and repairing products i.e reused APIs and reused UI libraries and reusable test frameworks such as cypress, Appium and WebdriverIO.

• Product design for sustainability: Sustainable software engineering also involves designing products with sustainability in mind. This includes the use of eco-friendly colour selection, reducing the carbon footprint of digital products, and designing UI/APIs that can be reused across labs

By adopting Sustainable software engineering practices, companies can reduce their environmental impact, save costs, and improve their reputation among consumers who are increasingly aware of sustainability issues.

Congratulations to Thenmozhi Paramasivam for their leading #TechSustainability adaptations resulted in massive recognitions in #DigitalTransformationAwards:

Circular Economy Ambition: Digital Transformation to reduce carbon impact

USE OF BUSINESS ANALYTICS

Splunk Dashboards

Industry wide log verifications are done through popular dashboards such as Splunk ,Logpoint or Datalogs. These providers facilitate their own customizations to capture carbon impact assessments based on filter in their custom commands.

Splunk built a toolkit that enables carbon footprint assessment.

The Sustainability Toolkit for Splunk equips organizations with tools to build a holistic view and gain deep insights into their carbon footprint to align with new sustainability imperatives.

Dynatrace

If your applications configured to use Dynatrace, it is easy to configure 'Carbon Impact' Dashboards at Dynatrace! If we are to make any positive change towards Net Zero goals, it is important to measure co2e (Carbon Dioxide Equivalent) as first step.

Source: Carbon Impact | Dynatrace Docs

Circular Economy Ambition: Measure carbon impact

LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT

If we are to learn about Co2e, NetZero, Carbon Neutral and Carbon Negative, it is highly recommended to learn the basics and key differences of each terminologies and Sustainability Ambitions.

As a Sustainability Engineering Lead, it is my passion to learn and adapt industry's leading practices to adapt part of engineering development and I was fortunate to attend both Sustainable IT-Decoded from Google(a free course) and Advanced Sustainability Course from University of Exeter (a paid course).

Sustainable IT-Decoded is one of the best fundamentals to #Sustainability in IT and thanks to Kelly Mulrooney for sharing her latest course completion status in Linked-in:

If you are completed the certification from Google SustainableIT-Decoded, please feel free to update the comments below and share your certificate snapshot to celebrate the best moments!

Once foundation being learnt and digested, next step is to learn Circular Economy along with key sustainability domain across #Energy, #NetZero, #Nature & #Biodiversity ,Built Environment & Energy,  Transport & #Agriculture, #Manufacturing & Financial Sector Product Portfolios ,Innovation & Client Engagement -I managed to grasp key lessons of these topics from University of Exeter Business School that helped setting the roadmap right for my engineering teams-thanks to Nicky Cunningham and professors.

If you are interested to learn about #CircularEconomy, highly advisable to sign-up to the latest calendar of this wonderful program.

Now the key question is on 'how to crack these best practices at the coding and design phases of SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) if you are starting these adaptions as a fresh engineering implementation'? Please leave any useful insights in comments. These insights will be shared in next newsletter.

Hope this monthly newsletter on Green Engineering Leadership is useful-please feel free to share your feedback and comments to understand further needs to plan for next monthly newsletter on #Sustainability!

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