I’ve been tossing the idea of Sustainable Software back and forth in my mind for over a decade, possibly even longer than that.

By now, I’ve been working as a professional software engineer for more than 17 years, for a wide variety of companies, most of whom have standardised around different technology stacks. I’ve used PHP, Go, JavaScript, Ruby, Python; even some Perl, though I definitely wouldn’t claim to be current in all of them.

I’ve also worked with a number of different project management techniques, from extremely formalised approaches like PRINCE2, to more agile-focused ones like Scrum and Shape Up. I definitely have a preference towards the lighter touch approaches, however!

Throughout all of this time, the idea that software development should be sustainable has stuck with me. Whilst there are times when, as a team, you need to pull out all of the stops in order to deliver a key feature in a very tight timescale, this definitely should not be the norm. Not unless you want to see a high rate of attrition amongst your engineers and a significant accumulation of technical debt, that is. And if you do want those things… I don’t think there’s anything I could say that would convince you otherwise.

To me, sustainable software engineering is about making the right decisions for the long term health of your product and of your team. It’s about keeping the quality high; it’s about being able to build software that is future-proof, that can adapt to the ever-changing needs of your team, your company, and your customers, whether they be internal or external.

As such, there’s no single prescribed way to achieve sustainability. Your team is different to my team, and both are different to other teams. I don’t know the environment in which you’re working, what your constraints are in terms of time and budget. The technology stack you’re working with also influences these decisions, and you may not have the option to change that either.

That being said, I firmly believe that you’ll enjoy more success if you avoid bleeding edge technology as much as is humanly possible. I’ve read Dan McKinley’s awesome “Choose Boring Technology” essay (and if you haven’t, make sure you set aside the time to do so). Adopting the latest and greatest is fun, of course, and it definitely scratches an itch most of us engineers feel from time-to-time, but it increases the risk of your product and your project getting wildly out of control and becoming unmaintainable. Choose stable tools that provide proven solutions, wherever you can.

Try not to throw too many roadblocks in front of your team; you don’t want them to become frustrated. You want them to be focused on delivering the best product they’re capable of. Talk to your engineers. Identify their frustrations, then put a plan in place to mitigate them as best you can.

Make sure your product is stable; you’ll struggle to maintain a steady pace if you’ve built on sand. That means writing tests. It means having appropriate monitoring in place, and it means that the ever-growing backlog of bugs must be addressed regularly. Every time you prioritise new feature work over a bug ticket, you’re increasing the amount of technical debt in your product, and it will catch up with you in the long run, unless your company runs out of money first.

Keep your dependencies up-to-date too. If there’s been a security vulnerability in one of the libraries you’re using, the last thing you need is to first have to upgrade a whole bunch of other libraries in order to be able to get to a secure version again. I’ve been there, it’s not fun.

I’m undoubtedly going to have more to say on this subject, but I just wanted to finally write some of these things down so that I can get them out of my head.