Towards Greener Software Engineering Using Software Analytics: A Systematic Mapping

Abstract

Sustainability in software engineering is a relatively new and fast growing field of research. Green software engineering aims to produce sustainable software products with minimum negative impact on the environment. In order to make greener software products, software practitioners need actionable timely information, to make useful trade-offs between energy efficiency and other quality attributes, like performance, during development. Software analytics could be used to provide this support, as it combines information from different software artifacts and converts it into useful information. The objective of this paper is to provide an overview of the sub-domains, contribution types, research types, research methods, future research potentials and the role of software analytics in the field of green software engineering in 2015-16. We applied the systematic mapping method and conducted a search for studies in six online databases. Screening of papers was done according to inclusion/exclusion criteria and 50 selected studies were classified after analysis and data extraction. We found that there are many validation studies but hardly any evaluation and experience papers in the domain of green software engineering. Only 11 out of 50 papers in the green software engineering domain used software analytics techniques to foster green software engineering. Our results indicate the need to develop new/improved automated software analytics tools for software practitioners along with metrics explaining the correlation between energy usage and other quality attributes.