On energy debt

Abstract

This paper introduces the concept of energy debt: a new metric, reflecting the implied cost in terms of energy consumption over time, of choosing a flawed implementation of a software system rather than a more robust, yet possibly time consuming, approach. A flawed implementation is considered to contain code smells, known to have a negative influence on the energy consumption.Similar to technical debt, if energy debt is not properly addressed, it can accumulate an energy "interest". This interest will keep increasing as new versions of the software are released, and eventually reach a point where the interest will be higher than the initial energy debt. Addressing the issues/smells at such a point can remove energy debt, at the cost of having already consumed a significant amount of energy which can translate into high costs. We present all underlying concepts of energy debt, bridging the connection with the existing concept of technical debt and show how to compute the energy debt through a motivational example. CCS CONCEPTS• Software and its engineering → Automated static analysis; Software performance.

An Exploratory Study on the Occurrence of Self-Admitted Technical Debt in Android Apps

“…This means that developers are conscious of the debt that they have introduced or are saddled with. But other forms of debt may be less obvious to them, such as architectural debt [56] or energy debt [26]. For this reason, we may not be to generalize these results to all forms of technical debt.…”

“…However, the authors do not conduct an empirical or case study using their proposed approach. Couto et al [26] present the concept of Energy Debt that occurs in mobile apps due to the existence of energy code smells in its source code. The concepts presented in the study are incorporated into a SonarQube-based tool by Maia et al [27] that calculates the energy debt of Android apps.…”