E-Debitum: managing software energy debt

Abstract

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 catalog 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. © 2020 ACM.