E-Debitum: managing software energy debt

35th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering Workshops (ASEW ’20) - International Workshop on Sustainable Software Engineering (SUSTAIN-SE)This paper extends previous work on the concept of a new software energy metric: Energy Debt. This metric is a reflection on the implied cost, in terms of energy consumption over time, of choosing an energy flawed software implementation over a more robust and efficient, yet time consuming, approach. This paper presents the implementation a SonarQube tool called E-Debitum which calculates the energy debt of Android applications throughout their versions. This plugin uses a robust, well defined, and extendable smell catalogue based on current green software literature, with each smell defining the potential energy savings. To conclude, an experimental validation of E-Debitum was executed on 3 popular Android applications with various releases, showing how their energy debt fluctuated throughout releases.This work is financed by National Funds through the Portuguese funding agency, FCT -Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia within project UIDB/50014/2020

Greenspecting Android virtual keyboards

During this still increasing mobile devices proliferation age, much of human-computer interaction involves text input, and the task of typing text is provided via virtual keyboards. In a mobile setting, energy consumption is a key concern for both hardware manufacturers and software developers. Virtual keyboards are software applications, and thus, inefficient applications have a negative impact on the overall energy consumption of the underlying device. Energy consumption analysis and optimization of mobile software is a recent and active area of research. Surprisingly, there is no study analyzing the energy efficiency of the most used software keyboards and evaluating the performance advantage of its features. In this paper, we studied the energy performance of five of the most used virtual keyboards in the Android ecosystem. We measure and analyze the energy consumption in different keyboard scenarios, namely with or without using word prediction. This work presents the results of two studies: one where we instructed the keyboards to simulate the writing of a predefined input text, and another where we performed an empirical study with real users writing the same text. Our studies show that there exist relevant performance differences among the most used keyboards of the considered ecosystem, and it is possible to save nearly 18% of energy by replacing the most used keyboard in Android by the most efficient one. We also showed that is possible to save both energy and time by disabling keyboard intrinsic features and that the use of word suggestions not always compensate for energy and time.- (undefined

Towards using memoization for saving energy in android

Over the last few years, the interest in the analysis of the energy consumption of Android applications has been increasing significantly. Indeed, there are a considerable number of studies which aim at analyzing the energy consumption in the Android ecosystem, such as measuring/estimating the energy consumed by an application or block of code, or even detecting energy expensive coding patterns or APIs. In this paper, we present an initial study of the impact of memoization in the energy consumption of Android applications. We compare implementations of 18 methods from different applications, with and without using memoization, and measure the energy consumption of both of them. The results show that using memoization can be a good approach for saving energy, since 13 of those methods decreased their energy consumption.Work financed by the ERDF - European Regional Development Fund through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalisation - COMPETE 2020 Programme and by National Funds through the Portuguese funding agency, Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, project POCI-01-0145-FEDER-016718