Awakening Awareness on Energy Consumption in Software Engineering

Software producing organizations have the ability to address the energy impact of their ICT solutions during the development process. However, while industry is convinced of the energy impact of hardware, the role of software has mostly been acknowledged by researchers in software engineering. Strengthened by the limited practical knowledge to reduce the energy consumption, organizations have less control over the energy impact of their products and lose the contribution of software towards energy related strategies. Consequently, industry risks not being able to meet customer requirements or even fulfillcorporate sustainability goals. In this paper we perform an exploratory case study on how to create and maintain awareness on an energy consumption perspective for software among stakeholders involved with the development of software products. During the study, we followed the development process of two commercial software products and provided direct feedback to the stakeholders on the effects of their development efforts, specifically concerning energy consumption and performance, using an energy dashboard. Multiple awareness measurements allowed us to keep track of changes over time on specific aspects affecting software development. Our results show that, despite a mixed sentiment towards the dashboard, changed awareness has triggered discussion on the energy consumption of software.