Background. Often motivated by optimization objectives, software products are characterized by different subsequent releases and deployed through different strategies. The impact of these two aspects of software on energy consumption has still to be completely understood and can be improved by carrying out ad-hoc analyses for specific software products. Aims. In this research we report on an industrial collaboration aiming at assessing the different impact that releases and deployment strategies of a software product can have on the energy consumption of its underlying hardware infrastructure. Method. We designed and performed an empirical experiment in a controlled environment. Deployment strategies, releases and use case scenarios of an industrial third-party software product were adopted as experimental factors. The use case scenarios were used as a blocking factor and adopted to dynamically load-test the software product. Power consumption and execution time were selected as response variables to measure the energy consumption. Results. We observed that both deployment strategies and software releases significantly influence the energy consumption of the hardware infrastructure. A strong interaction between the two factors was identified. The impact of such interaction highly varied depending on which use case scenario was considered, making the identification of the most frequently adopted use case scenario critical for energy optimisation. The collaboration between industry and academia has been productive for both parties, even if some practitioners manifested low interest/awareness on software energy efficiency. Conclusions. For the software product considered there is no absolute preferable release or deployment strategy with respect to energy efficiency, as the interaction of these factors has to be considered. The number of machines involved in a software deployment strategy does not simply constitute an additive effect of the energy consumption of the underlying hardware infrastructure.

Among other knowledge, software architecture design decision-making relies on the relation between architectural patterns and quality attributes (QAs). However, this relation is often implicit, or in the best case informally and partially defined. This leads to sub-optimal understanding of the impact of the architecture design on the desired level of quality. In this work, we aim to shed light on the relation patterns-QAs in the context of an important architectural mechanism, architectural tactics. Tactics are design decisions that address a specific quality attribute. In turn, the implementation of a tactic has a different impact according to the used pattern. From a previous systematic literature review, we selected and analyzed 13 primary studies with a clear focus on tactics. From our analysis, we extracted three overarching challenges on the relationship patterns-QAs that are yet unsolved by research. The essence of these challenges suggests that further research is needed to identify a clear and precise link between the functional nature of architectural elements and non-functional quality properties.

Abstract In the quest for energy efficient Information and Communication Technology, research has mostly focused on the role of hardware. However, the impact of software on energy consumption has been acknowledged as significant by researchers in software engineering. In spite of that, due to cost and time constraints, many software producing organizations are unable to effectively measure software energy consumption preventing them to include energy efficiency in the product roadmap. In this paper, we apply a software energy profiling method to reliably compare the energy consumed by a commercial software product across 2 consecutive releases. We demonstrate how the method can be applied and provide an in‐depth analysis of energy consumption of software components. Additionally, we investigate the added value of these measurement for multiple stakeholders in a software producing organization, by means of semistructured interviews. Our results show how the introduction of an encryption module caused a noticeable increase in the energy consumption of the product. Such results were deemed valuable by the stakeholders and provided insights on how specific software changes might affect energy consumption. In addition, our interviews show that such a quantification of software energy consumption helps to create awareness and eventually consider energy efficiency aspects when planning software releases.

Context. Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) frameworks are widely used in business software applications to interact with database systems. Even if ORMs introduce several benefits when compared to a plain SQL approach, these techniques have known disadvantages.

Software energy efficiency is a research topic where experimentation is widely adopted. Nevertheless, current studies and research approaches struggle to find generalizable findings that can be used to build a consistent knowledge base for energy-efficient software. To this end, we will discuss how to combine the traditional hypothesis-driven (top-down) approach with a bottom-up discovery approach. In this technical briefing, participants will learn the challenges that characterize the research in software energy efficiency. They will experience the complexity in this field and its implications for experimentation.

Several initiatives have been proposed in recent years with the purpose of investigating how to tackle sustainability issues within software systems and software engineering. However, there is a lack of attention from the research community in exploring sustainability as an emergent quality property of the software systems, especially when they are becoming more and more distributed, heterogeneous, and dynamic. In order to involve a more international research community, and provide an open forum for researchers and practitioners working on green and sustainable measurement and metrics, an interactive workshop is planned within the IWSM-Mensura conference.

Energy efficiency is a primary concern for the ICT sector. In particular, the widespread adoption of cloud computing technologies has drawn attention to the massive energy consumption of data centers. Although hardware constantly improves with respect to energy efficiency, this should also be a main concern for software. In previous work we analyzed the literature and elicited a set of techniques for addressing energy efficiency in cloud-based software architectures. In this work we codified these techniques in the form of Green Architectural Tactics. These tactics will help architects extend their design reasoning towards energy efficiency and to apply reusable solutions for greener software.