Energy efficiency on the product roadmap: An empirical study across releases of a software product

Abstract

SUMMARYIn the quest for energy efficient ICT, research has mostly focused on the role of hardware. However, the impact of software on energy consumption has been acknowledged as significant by researchers in software engineering. In spite of that, due to cost and time constraints, many software producing organizations are unable to effectively measure software energy consumption preventing them to include energy efficiency in the product roadmap. In this paper, we apply a software energy profiling method to reliably compare the energy consumed by a commercial software product across two consecutive releases. We demonstrate how the method can be applied and provide an in-depth analysis of energy consumption of software components. Additionally, we investigate the added value of these measurement for multiple stakeholders in a software producing organization, by means of semi-structured interviews. Our results show how the introduction of an encryption module caused a noticeable increase in the energy consumption of the product. Such results were deemed valuable by the stakeholders and provided insights on how specific software changes might affect energy consumption. In addition, our interviews show that such a quantification of software energy consumption helps to create awareness and eventually consider energy efficiency aspects when planning software releases.

On Reducing the Energy Consumption of Software

“…The study provided some interesting results, reporting for example that i) mobile developers are more concerned about software energy consumption problems, ii) energy concerns are largely ignored during maintenance, iii) energy requirements are more often desires rather than specific targets, iv) developers believe they do not have accurate intuitions about the energy usage of their code and are undecided about whether energy issues are more difficult to fix than performance issues, and v) 93% of the survey participants want to learn about energy issues from profiling and static code analysis, Interestingly, this last result is in contrast to Johnson et al work [15], in which they interviewed 20 candidates through a qualitative study and discussed why developers do not use static analysis to find bugs, such as false positives and the way warnings are displayed. One other similar work is [14], where the authors conducted a set of semi-structured interviews to discuss the added value of an applied energy profiling method across releases of software. Software energy consumption was also subject to many other empirical studies.…”

“…The last decade witnessed several attempts to consider green software design as a core development concern to improve the energy efficiency of software systems at large [2,3,18,23,26]. However, despite previous studies that have contributed to establish guidelines and tools to analyze and reduce the energy consumption [1,7,12,16,17,25,32], these contributions fail to be adopted by practitioners till date [14,28].…”

Energy Efficient Software Development Process Evaluation for MacOS Devices

“…Such estimation is made possible using a software power model that has been trained on a reference device representative of the low powered devices applications might run on [15,17,19,20,22]. Based on the findings of the research, metrics like following were investigated [10]: -Software Energy Consumption (SEC) -the total energy consumed by the software; -Unit Energy Consumption (UEC) -the energy consumed by a specific unit of the software;…”

Does maintainability relate to the energy consumption of software? A case study

“…Green Software requirements also influence other aspects of software quality (Jagroep et al 2017), so it is important to analyze whether there is a relationship between them and other already well-known characteristics of the quality (such as those included in the ISO 25010 standard-ISO (2011)). In fact, there are a number of studies which demonstrate that the use of good practices in software engineering can improve energy efficiency.…”