Publications

Improving Energy Efficiency Through Automatic Refactoring

Authors: Luís Cruz and Rui Abreu

Published in: Journal of Software Engineering and Research Development (JSERD).

Abstract: The ever-growing popularity of mobile phones has brought additional challenges to the software development lifecycle. Mobile applications ought to provide the same set of features as conventional software, with limited resources: such as limited processing capabilities, storage, screen and, not less important, power source. Although energy efficiency is a valuable requirement, developers often lack knowledge of best practices. In this paper, we propose a tool to improve the energy efficiency of Android applications using automatic refactoring — Leafactor. The tool features five energy code smells that tend to go unnoticed. In addition, we study whether automatic refactoring can aid developers to ship energy efficient mobile applications with a dataset of 140 free and open source apps. As a result, we detect and fix code smells in 45 Android apps, from which 40% have successfully merged our changes into the official repository.

@article{cruz2019improving, title={Improving Energy Efficiency Through Automatic Refactoring}, volume={7}, url={https://sol.sbc.org.br/journals/index.php/jserd/article/view/17}, DOI={10.5753/jserd.2019.17}, journal={Journal of Software Engineering Research and Development}, author={Cruz, Luis and Abreu, Rui}, year={2019}, month={Aug.}, pages={2:1– 2:9} }

Read me: DOI: 10.5753/jserd.2019.17.