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This study investigates the practical feasibility of Sustainable Software Engineering (SSE) tools in regulated industrial settings by evaluating practitioner perceptions across technical, organizational, and cultural dimensions. Through workshops and surveys with software practitioners in the financial sector, the research identified key preferences for SSE tools, including seamless integration with existing IDEs/pipelines, minimal data access needs, and interpretable outputs. The findings highlight the significant impact of compliance requirements, approval processes, and time constraints on the perceived feasibility and adoption of SSE tools in regulated environments.
Software engineers in regulated industries will only adopt sustainable coding tools that fit seamlessly into their existing workflows, require minimal data access, and provide actionable insights.
While Sustainable Software Engineering (SSE) tools are widely studied in academia, their practical feasibility in industrial workflows, particularly in regulated environments, remains poorly understood. This study investigates how software practitioners perceive the feasibility of existing SSE tools and techniques, and examines the technical, organizational, and cultural factors shaping their adoption in practice. We identified prominent categories of SSE tools targeting energy consumption, green refactoring, and workload management, and evaluated them along three practitioner-relevant dimensions: installation, input requirements, and output formats. These were presented through an interactive web application and explored in workshops with 16 practitioners from a regulated financial-sector organization, followed by a survey of 27 software practitioners. Our findings suggest that the practitioners strongly favored tools that integrate into existing IDEs or pipelines, require minimal and locally scoped data access, and provide interpretable, actionable outputs such as dashboards or automated refactoring suggestions. In regulated settings, compliance requirements, approval processes, and time constraints significantly shaped feasibility perceptions. Our contribution lies in providing empirical evidence of these preferences alongside other factors that affect regulated industrial contexts. The findings offer actionable guidance for designing SSE tools that better align with real-world development workflows and organizational constraints.
