An empirical study of practitioners' perspectives on green software engineering

Abstract

The energy consumption of software is an increasing concern as the use of mobile applications, embedded systems, and data center-based services expands. While research in green software engineering is correspondingly increasing, little is known about the current practices and perspectives of software engineers in the field. This paper describes the first empirical study of how practitioners think about energy when they write requirements, design, construct, test, and maintain their software. We report findings from a quantitative, targeted survey of 464 practitioners from ABB, Google, IBM, and Microsoft, which was motivated by and supported with qualitative data from 18 in-depth interviews with Microsoft employees. The major findings and implications from the collected data contextualize existing green software engineering research and suggest directions for researchers aiming to develop strategies and tools to help practitioners improve the energy usage of their applications.

Supporting software evolution through feedback on executing/skipping energy tests for proposed source code changes

“…These studies include impacts of performance tips, code obfuscation, code refactorings, design patterns, web servers, sorting algorithms, advertisements, API usage,() and programming models . In addition, researchers have investigated an application's energy consumption among versions and among separate implementations of the same application, the energy consumption impacts of selecting between different software systems that achieve the same purpose, how developers ask questions about energy usage, and how developers think about energy when they develop their software …”

Achievements, Open Problems and Challenges for Search Based Software Testing

“…One study, conducted in 2009 and again, by the same authors, in 2011 [108], estimated the proportion of global electricity consumption due to information and communications technology rose from 3% to 6% between the two years at which the assessments were reported. Testing and optimising energy consumption is therefore an ecological imperative as well as pressing user need [82].…”

Self-Adaptive Energy-Efficent Applications: The HADAS Developing Approach

“…Although software systems do not directly consume energy, they strongly affect the energy consumption of the hardware [2]. So developers should be more aware of the energy consumed by these systems during their usage, and try to develop energy-efficient applications that adapt their behavior to minimize the energy consumed during their execution, i.e., develop self-greening applications [3,4].…”

“…They rarely address energy efficiency as some recent studies show [3,4], principally due to a lack of appropriate methodologies and tools which would help them to produce self-adaptable green software at runtime. Therefore, although software energy efficiency is becoming increasingly important, development processes of self-greening systems supported by tools are still in their infancy.…”