Systematic Detection of Energy Regressions in Software Version Histories

Abstract

Context: Green software engineering is emerging as a crucial response to the rising energy impact of information technology, especially in continuous development. However, challenges remain in devising automated methods to efficiently identify energy regressions across commits. In particular, little effort has been put into automatically detecting regressions at the commit level by identifying statistically significant changes in energy consumption. Objectives: This paper presents EnergyTrackr, an approach for detecting energy regressions across multiple commits. Methods: We empirically evaluated EnergyTrackr on 1,932 commits from five Java projects, assessing its ability to identify significant energy changes. We also compared a straightforward linear algorithm that analyzes the entire commit history with a more efficient dichotomous search algorithm. Results: The evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of EnergyTrackr in identifying significant energy changes across commits. Our findings highlight the efficiency of the dichotomous algorithm in uncovering overall software energy trends, achieving results comparable to the linear approach while reducing resource consumption and processing time. Conclusion: We expect EnergyTrackr to help developers accurately monitor energy regressions and improvements in their projects and optimize their source code to reduce software energy consumption.