Green Software Lab

New Paper Accepted @ MobileSoft’17 (Tool Demo)

Leafactor: Improving Energy Efficiency of Android Apps via Automatic Refactoring – Luis Cru, Rui Abreu and Jean-Nöel Rouvignac

Leafactor is a tool to automatically improve the energy consumption of Android apps. It does so by refactoring the source code to follow a set of patterns known to be energy efficient. The toolset was validated using 222 refactorings in 140 open-source apps. Changes were submitted to the original apps by creating pull requests to the official projects.

New Paper Accepted @ MobileSoft’17

Performance-based Guidelines for Energy Efficient Mobile Applications – Luís Cruz and Rui Abreu

Mobile and wearable devices are nowadays the de facto personal computers, while desktop computers are becoming less popular. Therefore, it is important for companies to deliver efficient mobile applications. As an example, Google has published a set of best practices to optimize the performance of Android applications. However, these guidelines fall short to address energy consumption. As mobile software applications operate in resource-constrained environments, guidelines to build energy efficient applications are of utmost importance. In this paper, we studied whether or not eight best performance-based practices have an impact on the energy consumed by Android applications. In an experimental study with six popular mobile applications, we observed that the battery of the mobile device can last up to approximately an extra hour if the applications are developed with energy-aware practices. This work paves the way for a set of guidelines for energy-aware automatic refactoring techniques.