Dear Diary: How Energy-Expensive is a Bug?

Dear Diary, I'm always honest with you. Many companies see the need of contributing to our environment and being sustainable. Using green hosting providers and data centers, or avoiding flights for business trips is one dimension they apply or consider to do. This is good already or at least a first step into the right direction! But, from my perspective, becoming energy-neutral is only one part of the whole story. I'm struggling with the question of what we can really do to reduce our resource consumption? As always when I have a conflict with myself I'm writing to you. I'm convinced that we as software developers have a strong responsibility to reflect on our power to refer to energy consumption as a first-class quality we can genuinely improve (= reduce) in order to make a difference for nature and our environment. Additionally, current situation of stupid wars also shows that dependencies to electricity providers should be avoided. So, dear diary, I'm going to create a talk for the Agile Testing Days, and I will shed some light on the challenge to reduce energy consumption of our developed software. I'll show that it is important to be able to identify energy bugs and how to measure them. Yes, we can do something in the domain of software development! I hope the audience will like it and that it can help in changing their thinking.