Posted by s.crouch on 26 April 2012 - 4:29pm 

At the Software Sustainability Institute I’m often asked - unsurprisingly – to evaluate the sustainability of software. This typically leads to a report for the developers with observations and recommendations for improvement. Wouldn’t it be better if there was some way of evaluating your own software?

There is! Having a third-party assess the state of your software in some way, be it a colleague testing the install process and documentation to provide feedback, or having the Institute perform a full evaluation is always useful. However, developing the skill to impartially self-assess your own software is invaluable. Adopting an objective ‘green’ user or developer perspective – removing your inner assumptions and knowledge of the software from the equation – can only help your software to become better.

Not only are the Institute’s processes for evaluation available for you to use yourselves, but there is now a very helpful, lightweight and quick sustainability evaluation you can do on your own. You just fill in a simple web form with details about your software, and it returns a list of recommendations (with helpful links) on how you can improve your software. Simple! It investigates a number of key areas related to the sustainability of your software, including the processes for building and installation, documentation, availability, support, licences and source code structure, amongst many others.

You can check out this nifty evaluation resource.