Skip to main content

Advertisement

SpringerLink
Log in

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

  • Published:
Software Quality Journal Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Energy consumption of software has been becoming increasingly significant, since it can vary according to how the software has been developed. In recent years, developers and researchers have been interested in analyzing, among other things, how energy consumption evolves when changes occur from one version to another in any given software. Thus far, the only studies available are theoretical papers that reinforce the idea that maintainability may have an influence on energy use, but this needs to be proven empirically, which is the goal of this article. This work presents an empirical study carried out to test whether there is a relationship between the energy consumption and the maintainability of several versions of Redmine. Maintainability has been assessed by means of different measures, such as the number of lines of code, or the complexity of the software, calculated using SonarCloud, and the energy consumption measurements have been captured using the EET device. The results obtained show that the number of lines of code affects both the energy consumption of the processor and the total consumption of the computer where the software is run. It is intended that the results from this work should serve as a basis for the undertaking of new empirical studies which will enable the relationship between the software maintainability and the energy efficiency of that software to be better understood.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. SonarCloud. https://sonarcloud.io

  2. Redmine. https://www.redmine.org

  3. SonarCloud. https://sonarcloud.io

  4. http://alarcos.esi.uclm.es/sustainabilityandmaintainability

References

  • Andrae, A. (2017). Total consumer power consumption forecast. In: Nordic Digital Business Summit. Huawei Technologies.

  • Calero, C., & Piattini, M. (2017). Puzzling out software sustainability. Sustainable Computing: Informatics and Systems, 16, 117–124.

    Google Scholar 

  • Calero, C., Bertoa, M. F., & Moraga, M. Á. (2013). A systematic literature review for software sustainability measures. In: 2013 2nd international workshop on green and sustainable software (GREENS). IEEE, pp 46-53. https://doi.org/10.1109/GREENS.2013.6606421.

  • Calero, C., Mancebo, J., García, F., Moraga, M. Á., Berná, J. A. G., Fernández-Alemán, J. L., & Toval, A. (2019). 5Ws of green and sustainable software. Tsinghua Science and Technology, 25, 401–414.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Capra, E., Francalanci, C., & Slaughter, S. A. (2012). Is software “green”? Application development environments and energy efficiency in open source applications. Information and Software Technology, 54(1), 60–71.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chien, A. A. (2019). Owning computing’s environmental impact. Communications of the ACM, 62(3), 5–5. https://doi.org/10.1145/3310359.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cruz, L., Abreu, R., Grundy, J., Li, L., & Xia, X. (2019). Do energy-oriented changes hinder maintainability? In: IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME). IEEE, pp 29-40. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME.2019.00013.

  • Dick, M., & Naumann, S. (2010). Enhancing software engineering processes towards sustainable software product design. In: EnviroInfo. pp 706–715.

  • García-Mireles, G. A., Moraga, M. Á., García, F., Calero, C., & Piattini, M. (2018). Interactions between environmental sustainability goals and software product quality: A mapping study. Information and Software Technology, 95, 108–129.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • García-Rodríguez de Guzmán, I., Piattini, M., & Pérez-Castillo, R. (2015). Green software maintenance. In C. Calero & M. Piattini (Eds.), Green in Software Engineering (pp. 205–229). Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08581-4_9.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Hindle, A. (2012). Green mining: A methodology of relating software change to power consumption. In Proceedings of the 9th IEEE Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (pp. 78–87). IEEE Press.

  • Hindle, A. (2015). Green mining: A methodology of relating software change and configuration to power consumption. Empirical Software Engineering 20. pp 374–409 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-013-9276-6.

  • ISO (2011). ISO-IEC 25010: 2011 Systems and software engineering - Systems and software Quality Requirements and Evaluation (SQuaRE) - System and software quality models.

  • Jagroep, E., van der Werf, J. M., Brinkkemper, S., Procaccianti, G., Lago, P., Blom, L., van Vliet, R. (2016). Software energy profiling: Comparing releases of a software product. In: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering Companion. ACM, pp 523–532

  • Jagroep, E., Procaccianti, G., van der Werf, J. M., Brinkkemper, S., Blom, L., & van Vliet, R. (2017). Energy efficiency on the product roadmap: An empirical study across releases of a software product. Journal of Software: Evolution and Process 29. p 1852 https://doi.org/10.1002/smr.1852.

  • Jelschen, J., Gottschalk, M., Josefiok, M., Pitu, C., Winter, A. (2012). Towards applying reengineering services to energy-efficient applications. In: 2012 16th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering. IEEE, pp 353–358. https://doi.org/10.1109/CSMR.2012.43.

  • Jones, N. (2018). How to stop data centres from gobbling up the world’s electricity. Nature, 561(7722), 163–167.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lima, L. G., Soares-Neto, F., Lieuthier, P., Castor, F., Melfe, G., & Fernandes, J. P. (2019). On Haskell and energy efficiency. Journal of Systems and Software, 149, 554–580.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mancebo, J., Arriaga, H. O., García, F., Moraga, M., de Guzmán, I. G. -R., & Calero, C. (2018). EET: A device to support the measurement of software consumption. In: Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Green and Sustainable Software, Gothenburg, Sweden. ACM, pp 16–22. https://doi.org/10.1145/3194078.3194081.

  • Palomba, F., Di Nucci, D., Panichella, A., Zaidman, A., & De Lucia, A. (2019). On the impact of code smells on the energy consumption of mobile applications. Information and Software Technology, 105, 43–55.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Park, J. J., Hong, J.-E., & Lee, S.-H. (2014). Investigation for software power consumption of code refactoring techniques (pp. 717–722). In: SEKE.

    Google Scholar 

  • Penzenstadler, B., Raturi, A., Richardson, D., Calero, C., Femmer, H., & Franch, X. (2014). Systematic mapping study on software engineering for sustainability (SE4S). In: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE), London, United Kingdom, vol 14. ACM, pp 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1145/2601248.2601256.

  • Pereira, R., Couto, M., Ribeiro, F., Rua, R., Cunha, J., Fernandes, J. P., & Saraiva, J. (2017). Energy efficiency across programming languages: How do energy, time, and memory relate? In: Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Software Language Engineering, Vancouver, Canada. ACM, pp 256–267. https://doi.org/10.1145/3136014.3136031.

  • Pereira, R., Carção, T., Couto, M., Cunha, J., Fernandes, J. P., & Saraiva, J. (2020). Spelling out energy leaks: Aiding developers locate energy inefficient code. Journal of Systems and Software, 161, 110463.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pérez-Castillo, R., & Piattini, M. (2014). Analyzing the harmful effect of god class refactoring on power consumption. IEEE Software, 31(3), 48–54.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pinto, G., & Castor, F. (2017). Energy efficiency: A new concern for application software developers. Communications of the ACM, 60(12), 68–75.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Procaccianti, G., Fernández, H., & Lago, P. (2016). Empirical evaluation of two best practices for energy-efficient software development. Journal of Systems and Software, 117, 185–198.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Radu, L. (2018). An ecological view on software reuse. Informatica Economica, 22, 75–85. https://doi.org/10.12948/issn14531305/22.3.2018.07.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sahin C, Pollock L, Clause J (2014) How do code refactorings affect energy usage? In: Proceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, Torino, Italy, vol 36. ACM, pp 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1145/2652524.2652538.

  • Verdecchia, R., Ricchiuti, F., Hankel, A., Lago, P., & Procaccianti, G. (2017). Green ICT research and challenges. In Advances and New Trends in Environmental Informatics (pp. 37–48). Springer.

  • Verdecchia, R., Saez, R. A., Procaccianti G, Lago P (2018) Empirical evaluation of the energy impact of refactoring code Smells. In: ICT4S2018. 5th International Conference on Information and Communication Technology for Sustainability. pp 365-383. https://doi.org/10.29007/dz83.

  • Wohlin, C., Runeson, P., Höst, M., Ohlsson, M., Regnell, B., & Wesslén, A. (2012). Experimentation in software engineering. Springer Science & Business Media.

Download references

Funding

This work was part of the BIZDEVOPS-Global (RTI2018-098309-B-C31), supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness and European FEDER funds, and was also part of the SOS project (No. SBPLY/17/180501/000364), funded by the Department of Education, Culture and Sports of the Directorate General of Universities, Research and Innovation of the JCCM (Regional Government of the Autonomous Region of Castilla-La Mancha).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Alarcos Research Group, Institute of Technology and Information Systems, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Ciudad Real, Spain

    Javier Mancebo, Coral Calero & Félix García

Authors
  1. Javier Mancebo
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Coral Calero
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Félix García
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Javier Mancebo.

Additional information

Publisher’s note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Mancebo, J., Calero, C. & García, F. Does maintainability relate to the energy consumption of software? A case study. Software Qual J 29, 101–127 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-020-09536-9

Download citation

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-020-09536-9

Keywords

Search

Navigation