Does maintainability relate to the energy consumption of software? A case study

Abstract

Energy consumption of software has been becoming increasingly significant, since it can vary according to how the software has been developed. In recent years, developers and researchers have been interested in analyzing, among other things, how energy consumption evolves when changes occur from one version to another in any given software. Thus far, the only studies available are theoretical papers that reinforce the idea that maintainability may have an influence on energy use, but this needs to be proven empirically, which is the goal of this article. This work presents an empirical study carried out to test whether there is a relationship between the energy consumption and the maintainability of several versions of Redmine. Maintainability has been assessed by means of different measures, such as the number of lines of code, or the complexity of the software, calculated using SonarCloud, and the energy consumption measurements have been captured using the EET device. The results obtained show that the number of lines of code affects both the energy consumption of the processor and the total consumption of the computer where the software is run. It is intended that the results from this work should serve as a basis for the undertaking of new empirical studies which will enable the relationship between the software maintainability and the energy efficiency of that software to be better understood.