Can We Spot Energy Regressions using Developers Tests?
This addresses the problem of monitoring energy consumption in software development for practitioners, but it is incremental as it adapts existing regression testing concepts to energy metrics.
The paper investigates whether developers' tests in Continuous Integration can be used for energy regression testing to detect changes in software energy consumption, proposing an exploratory study to assess stability, accuracy in spotting regressions, and ability to pinpoint source code issues.
Software Energy Consumption(SEC) is gaining more and more attention. In this paper, we tackle the problem of hinting developers about the SEC of their programs in the context of software developments based on Continuous Integration(CI). In this study, we investigate if the CI can leverage developers' tests to perform a new class of tests: the energy regression testing. Energy regression is similar to performance regression but focused on the energy consumption of the program instead of standard performance indicators, like execution time or memory consumption. We propose to perform an exploratory study of the usage of developers' tests for energy regression testing. We propose to first investigate if developers' tests can be used to obtain stable SEC indicators. Then, to consider if comparing the SEC of developers' tests between two versions can accurately spot energy regressions introduced by automated program mutations. Finally, to assess if it can successfully pinpoint the source code lines guilty of energy regressions. Our study will pave the way for automated SEC regression tools that can be readily deployed inside an existing CI infrastructure to raise awareness of SEC issues among practitioners.