Characterizing Energy-Aware Software Projects: Are They Different?

The improvement in battery technology for battery-driven devices is insignificant compared to their computing ability. In spite of the overwhelming advances in processing ability, adoption of sophisticated applications is hindered by the fear of shorter battery life. This is one of the several reasons software developers are becoming conscious of writing energy efficient code. Research has been conducted to model software energy consumption, to reduce energy drains, and to understand developers expertise on energy efficiency. In this paper, however, we investigate the nature of energy-aware software projects. We observed that projects concerned with energy issues are larger and more popular than the projects that do not address energy consumption. Energy related code changes are larger than others (e.g., bug fixes). In addition, our initial results suggest that energy efficiency is mostly addressed on certain platforms and applications.