IEEE Software’s mission is to be the best source of reliable, useful, peer-reviewed information for leading software practitioners—the developers and managers who want to keep up with rapid technology change. The authority on translating software theory into practice, this bimonthly magazine positions itself between pure research and pure practice, transferring ideas, methods, and experiences among researchers and engineers. Peer-reviewed articles and columns by real-world experts illuminate all aspects of the industry, including process improvement, project management, development tools, software maintenance, web applications and opportunities, testing, and usability.

Technical articles are peer-reviewed carefully to ensure they offer practical and reliable ideas and techniques to readers. The departments cover key concerns of software development: requirements, design, architecture, tools, technologies, empirical evidence, and quality. We also publish insightful lessons-learned articles by people with stories to tell.

Software engineering experts in architecture and design, quality, project management, education, requirements, and many other areas of expertise help guide the selection of what we publish. Our Letters to the Editor, Point-Counterpoint debates, and Sounding Board contributions from thought leaders challenge the status quo and stimulate debate. The magazine has been helping train newcomers to software engineering since 1984, as professors, project managers, and developers pass on articles for their colleagues and students to read.

Scope

IEEE Software welcomes articles describing how software is developed in specific companies, laboratories, and university environments as well as articles describing new tools, current trends, and past projects’ limitations and failures as well as successes. Sample topics include geographically distributed development; software architectures; program and system debugging and testing; the education of software professionals; requirements, design, development, testing, and management methodologies; performance measurement and evaluation; standards; program and system reliability, security, and verification; programming environments; languages and language-related issues; web-based development; usability; and software-related social and legal issues.

Special Issue on Green Clean Software Sustainability
Submission Date: 2025-04-01

The energy footprint of software, software engineering, and software-intensive systems poses a significant concern.

Energy-hungry software-intensive systems, such as blockchain applications and cryptocurrencies, the pervasive integration and usage of central cloud and edge services and applications, along with AI-enabled systems, contribute to this issue. In addition, the global digital transformation of all industry sectors is accelerating the steep increase in software energy demands.

Green clean software pertains to the minimization of the energy needed to execute and use software-intensive systems. Adopting renewable energy resources to “feed” software execution is simply not enough, so reducing the carbon footprint must go hand in hand with minimizing the energy footprint.

The other way around, software-intensive systems may be used to support green processes that aim at reducing the environmental impact on the sector, society, and planet Earth. Examples include software supporting the production and consumption of renewable energy resources, smart software for green-oriented behavioral change (e.g., adopting green public transportation and sustainable work practices), and the combination of energy optimization and digitalization (so-called twin transition).

In addition, software sustainability from an environmental perspective may also concern software engineering and its processes: the energy used to develop, evolve, and maintain software-intensive systems is non-negligible and needs to be addressed.

This IEEE Software Special Theme issue aims to target both the green clean software, and the green through software dimensions, with special emphasis on the role played by green software engineering.

Possible topics:

    Practices and tactics for green clean software sustainability
    Green AI, AI for green
    Sustainability in data centers and high-performance computing
    Digital sufficiency
    Tradeoffs and balancing ecologic and technical software qualities
    Green clean software quality assessment
    Software sustainability by design
    Architecting for environmental sustainability
    Green quality metrics for software products and software engineering processes
    Standards, labels, indicators, and metrics for green clean software sustainability
    Sustainability reporting and the role of green clean software sustainability
    Green clean cloud and edge software
     Innovation, industrial adoption, and challenges related to green clean software sustainability