Is Well-Tested Code More Energy Efficient?

Abstract

Software testing plays an important role in building quality software and improving maintainability. However, there are no research studies to analyze its impact on energy efficiency. In this paper, we conduct a preliminary study on the impact of unit tests and code coverage on the energy consumption of software. Our empirical study analyzes the energy consumption of multiple JSON libraries and the relation of their energy efficiency to test metrics. Although our study has limitations in the size of the data set, we found that there are hints for a positive correlation between line coverage and energy consumption.

Balancing computational chemistry's potential with its environmental impact

“…130 These tools, as they require to be run on bare metal not virtual machines or containers, showcase the need for more software-level tracking. For some programming languages, [131][132][133] packages exist that allow tracking of resource and carbon emissions directly during execution. For Python, packages like TraCarbon 131 and CodeCarbon 132 are available.…”