Green Agile Guide — Preview (v0.8)

Independence: This guide has no affiliation with the official Scrum Guides, their authors, or Scrum.org. It builds on established agile concepts but was developed independently and extended with sustainability aspects.

1. Purpose and Positioning

The Green Agile Guide is an operating frame for software products. It extends proven agile ways of working with clear rules, accountabilities, and measures for ecological, economic, and social impact — without introducing new events or ceremonies. The goal is to make sustainable decisions systematic, intentional, and measurable in day-to-day development. The concepts are primarily for software and may be adapted to adjacent digital domains.

Extension, not replacement: The guide complements existing frameworks; it does not redefine them. It bridges to the organization’s sustainability strategy (e.g., CSRD/ESRS alignment) so product and corporate goals reinforce each other.

2. Foundations

2.1 Why agility and sustainability fit

Agile methods address uncertainty and complexity; sustainability is precisely such a long-horizon problem space. Empiricism makes impact visible, testable, and adaptable — using the same loops as for quality.

2.2 Three dimensions of sustainability

Ecological: Carbon awareness, energy efficiency, hardware efficiency across the product life cycle.
Economic: Maintainability, technology choices, investment protection, TCO transparency.
Social: Accessible, inclusive products; fair team structures; psychological safety.
The dimensions act together on product and organization.

2.3 Empiricism and sustainability

Empiricism relies on transparency → inspection → adaptation. Sustainability thus becomes part of product and process quality, not an external add-on: make impact visible, review it regularly, adapt when needed.

3. Values: Awareness & Responsibility

We add two values that make sustainability operational.

Awareness

Short definition: We pause before we act — we name assumptions, side effects, and life-cycle consequences, and interpret measurements in context.
Behavioral anchors (excerpt): Impact scan in refinement (user value, data/compute path, rebound, retention); surface uncertainties/biases; document decisions briefly and review them in retrospectives.
Anti-patterns: “We’ll measure later”; wall-of-numbers without normalization; local optima causing rebound.

Responsibility

Short definition: We take responsibility for the product’s environmental and social impact across its life cycle and decide based on measurable effects.
Behavioral anchors (excerpt): Sustainability goals in product/iteration goals; make trade-offs explicit; criteria in Definition of Ready and Green Definition of Done; measurement/estimation with stated uncertainty.
Anti-patterns: “Not our problem” (outsourcing impact); greenwashing; local optimization that increases the overall footprint.

4. Roles (no new roles)

Sustainability is anchored in existing roles; adding roles would fragment accountability.

Green Product Owner (GPO): Defines “value” including measurable sustainability goals (e.g., SCI/WCAG/TCO), aligns the Green Product Backlog to a Green Product Goal, orders by impact and risk, makes trade-offs transparent, and links to corporate goals/CSRD.
Green Developer Team (GDT): Delivers a usable increment each Development Iteration that meets the Green Definition of Done; monitors proxy metrics (e.g., data/txn, CPU-time/txn), reduces hotspots, and records key architecture/data decisions (ADR-Light).
Green Agile Coach (GAC): Embeds practices in the process (budgets in planning, impact in review, green-focused retros), removes impediments (tooling/data access), and strengthens empiricism/system thinking. Optional: rotating Sustainability Champion “hat” (10–20% capacity) or enabling functions (e.g., GreenOps) across teams.

5. Green Product Backlog

The Green Product Backlog is the ordered list of all known needs for a sustainable product. Each item considers, besides user/business value, its ecological, economic, and social impact (direct/indirect). Ordering uses value & impact; priority goes to items that measurably advance the Green Product Goal or address risk/compliance.

Definition of Ready (DoR): Impact fields (direct/indirect, dimension, metric baseline→target, verification) are filled; there is an alignment with the corporate sustainability strategy (e.g., ESRS-relevant needs, EU taxonomy); relevant sustainability/compliance stakeholders are engaged.

6. Green Definition of Done (GDoD)

The GDoD is the shared quality promise: an increment is “done” when it is functionally usable and the agreed sustainability goals are met or justified deviations are made explicit and addressed promptly.

Ecological (orientation): Efficiency budgets (compute time, data volume, storage) respected; no unjustified regressions vs. baseline; data minimization & retention; no unnecessary idle/background load; at least one impact-proximate metric documented.
Economic: Maintainable/scalable; no new technical debt without a follow-up plan; architecture supports operations & TCO transparency.
Social: Relevant accessibility requirements met (e.g., WCAG 2.2 AA); ethical/legal/internal standards upheld.
The GDoD is regularly inspected and adapted to keep contributing to sustainability goals.

7. Evolution

The Green Agile Guide evolves iteratively. Inputs from practice, research, and regulation (e.g., CSRD/ESRS) are incorporated. Organizations tailor the guide to their contexts; the core principles — empiricism, self-accountability, and sustainable value creation — remain unchanged.