GreenAdvisor: A tool for analyzing the impact of software evolution on energy consumption

摘要

Change-impact analysis, namely “identifying the potential consequences of a change” is an important and well studied problem in software evolution. Any change may potentially affect an application's behaviour, performance, and energy consumption profile. Our previous work demonstrated that changes to the system-call profile of an application correlated with changes to the application's energy-consumption profile. This paper evaluates and describes GreenAdvisor, a first of its kind tool that systematically records and analyzes an application's system calls to predict whether the energy-consumption profile of an application has changed. The GreenAdvisor tool was distributed to numerous software teams, whose members were surveyed about their experience using GreenAdvisor while developing Android applications to examine the energy-consumption impact of selected commits from the teams' projects. GreenAdvisor was evaluated against commits of these teams' projects. The two studies confirm the usefulness of our tool in assisting developers analyze and understand the energy-consumption profile changes of a new version. Based on our study findings, we constructed an improved prediction model to forecast the direction of the change, when a change in the energy-consumption profile is anticipated. This work can potentially be extremely useful to developers who currently have no similar tools.