Understanding Green Software Development: A Conceptual Framework

Abstract

Developers who aim to write energy-efficient software require both a new mindset and models and tools that can measure and reduce the software effect on hardware energy consumption. The authors' conceptual framework provides a unifying view of strategies, models, and tools. IT energy consumption is an increasingly relevant concern. Traditionally, only hardware designers dealt with energy consumption. However, as hardware became more powerful, the influence of software behavior on energy consumption grew significantly.During the last few years, we have explored several facets of IT energy consumption from a software engineering perspective. What was once purely anecdotal evidence about the pivotal role of software on energy consumption is now supported by sound empirical data we collected through a series of experiments on different hardware platforms: servers, desktop PCs, and mobile phones. We analyzed the power consumption of three servers performing different tasks, and we observed that power consumption can increase up to 40 percent depending on the usage scenario. 1 We analyzed desktop computers from different technological generations in distinct software usage scenarios and found out that, depending on the software applications used, power consumption can increase up to 20 percent. 2 Finally, we profiled the power consumption of mobile devices, comparing two generations of Android OS-based smartphones. Our results show how different execution profiles of the same application can significantly affect the power consumption of a mobile device. 3 Although the actual figures vary depending on the specific hardware platform, the impact of software on energy consumption is definitely relevant. This implies a change of mindset for the software engineering community. First,

Empirical evaluation of two best practices for energy-efficient software development

“…A dedicated laboratory environment for assessing software energy efficiency, such as the SEFLab, represents the starting point of a sound methodology for Green Software research, as well as a future testbench, when software testing for energy efficiency will be common practice, as it is now for other software qualities. The tools and analysis methods we adopted fit into a more general, reusable framework for Green Software Engineering [41,42], that we will further develop in our next research and education [43] efforts.…”

Agile practices for global software development vendors in the development of green and sustainable software

“…Green and sustainable software engineering is the art of designing and developing green and sustainable software through green software engineering practices . Therefore, it is an art of defining and developing a software system in such a way, so that the positive and negative impacts on sustainable development that result or expected to result from software system over the entire life cycle are constantly assessed, documented, and used for more optimization of software system …”

“…Sustainable software limits to add more hardware by providing updates to meet the evolving needs . Literature reveals that a number of researchers have worked in hardware domain but more research work needs to be performed for the development of green and sustainable software …”

“…4 Therefore, it is an art of defining and developing a software system in such a way, so that the positive and negative impacts on sustainable development that result or expected to result from software system over the entire life cycle are constantly assessed, documented, and used for more optimization of software system. 5,6 General solutions towards green software processes found in previous studies [42][43][44] include virtualization, closing of running applications that are no longer in use, efficient algorithms with optimized code and data structures, reduction of parallelism overhead by developing efficient load balancing algorithms, fine-grained green computing, and creating energy allocation algorithms for routing data.…”

“…[32][33][34] Literature [35][36][37] reveals that a number of researchers have worked in hardware domain but more research work needs to be performed for the development of green and sustainable software. 6 Recently, some efforts 11,38,39 have been performed in the context of building green and sustainable software, some design software processes to aid all stakeholders in building green software products. Other efforts contributed towards building software tools that measure the effect of software on the environment and the effect of application development environments, in terms of energy efficiency.…”