The problem

Sustainability stays incidental because nothing in the delivery process asks for it. Changes pass review on features, tests and security, and energy regressions ship unnoticed.

The fix you can use today

• Add an energy check for performance-critical changes to your definition of done.
• Gate releases on an energy regression test for key scenarios.
• Review energy trends in the same meeting as performance and cost.

GreenCode researchers found that energy is almost never part of a team's definition of done.

Tools that help

• Eco CI: estimates the energy of CI pipeline runs on GitHub Actions and GitLab, per step
• Green Metrics Tool: measures the energy of whole software scenarios run in containers, so runs can be repeated and compared

How GreenCode helps

GreenCode helps tackle this by building the energy test for you: a load test generated from the system's own endpoints that records energy as well as speed and ranks the hotspots by the energy they use. More on this.

Tags

#governance#ci-cd#testing

Sources

• GreenCode State of the Art Review, D2.1 (2025), PDF p. 63: sustainability not present in definition of done or acceptance criteria; efficiency regressions go unnoticed for months

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