EET: A Device to Support the Measurement of Software Consumption

Society is becoming more and more aware of the importance of preserving the environment, and is therefore increasingly concerned about issues related to sustainability. Software development should not remain indifferent to the need to construct software products that contribute towards sustainability, both during their creation and throughout their use. However, one of the main gaps is the difficulty of measuring the energy consumption when software is executed in order to detect, for example, parts of the software with excessive energy consumption. For that reason, a Framework for Energy Efficiency Testing to Improve eNviromental Goals of the Software (FEETINGS) has been proposed. In this paper, we focus on the core of the framework, that is, the Energy Efficiency Tester (EET), which is the measurement hardware device devoted to collecting the specific consumption data of the software under evaluation. The architecture and the main functions of EET, along with the reliability validation done with it are presented here, as well as an analysis of the data extracted from a case study conducted. The outcome of such analysis shows that EET is able to carry out stable energy consumption measurements of executed software.