Abstract
Reducing software carbon footprint could contribute to efforts to avert climate change. Past research indicates that developers lack knowledge on energy consumption and carbon footprint, and existing reduction guidelines are difficult to apply. Therefore, we propose that automated reduction methods should be explored, e.g., through genetic improvement. However, such tools must be voluntarily adopted and regularly used to have an impact.
In this study, we have conducted interviews and a survey (a) to explore developers’ existing opinions, knowledge, and practices with regard to carbon footprint and energy consumption, and (b), to identify the requirements that automated reduction tools must meet to ensure adoption. Our findings offer a foundation for future research on practices, guidelines, and automated tools that address software carbon footprint.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Andrae, A.S.: New perspectives on internet electricity use in 2030. Eng. Appl. Sci. Lett. 3(2), 19–31 (2020)
Bawdin, T.: Global warming: data centres to consume three times as much energy in next decade, experts warn. Independent 23, 276 (2016)
Bruce, B.R., Petke, J., Harman, M.: Reducing energy consumption using genetic improvement. In: Proceedings of the 2015 Annual Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation, pp. 1327–1334 (2015)
Cruzes, D.S., Dyba, T.: Recommended steps for thematic synthesis in software engineering. In: 2011 International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, pp. 275–284. IEEE (2011)
De La Luz, V., Kandemir, M., Kolcu, I.: Automatic data migration for reducing energy consumption in multi-bank memory systems. In: Proceedings 2002 Design Automation Conference (IEEE Cat. No. 02CH37324), pp. 213–218. IEEE (2002)
Dorn, J., Lacomis, J., Weimer, W., Forrest, S.: Automatically exploring tradeoffs between software output fidelity and energy costs. IEEE Trans. Software Eng. 45(3), 219–236 (2017)
Georgiou, S., Kechagia, M., Sharma, T., Sarro, F., Zou, Y.: Green AI: do deep learning frameworks have different costs? In: Proceedings of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2022, New York, NY, USA, pp. 1082–1094. Association for Computing Machinery (2022)
Hao, K.: Training a single AI model can emit as much carbon as five cars in their lifetimes. MIT Technol. Rev. 75, 103 (2019)
Lyu, H., Gay, G., Sakamoto, M.: Replication Data for “Developer Views on Software Carbon Footprint and its Potential for Automated Reduction, February 2023. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7597662
Manotas, I., Pollock, L., Clause, J.: Seeds: a software engineer’s energy-optimization decision support framework. In: Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering, pp. 503–514 (2014)
Mrazek, V., Vasicek, Z., Sekanina, L.: Evolutionary approximation of software for embedded systems: median function. In: Proceedings of the Companion Publication of the 2015 Annual Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation, pp. 795–801 (2015)
Ournani, Z., Rouvoy, R., Rust, P., Penhoat, J.: On reducing the energy consumption of software: from hurdles to requirements. In: Proceedings of the 14th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM), pp. 1–12 (2020)
Pang, C., Hindle, A., Adams, B., Hassan, A.E.: What do programmers know about software energy consumption? IEEE Softw. 33(3), 83–89 (2015)
Pinto, G., Castor, F., Liu, Y.D.: Mining questions about software energy consumption. In: Proceedings of the 11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories, pp. 22–31 (2014)
Sarro, F.: Search-based software engineering in the era of modern software systems. In: Proceedings of the 31st IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference. IEEE (2023)
Steinke, S., Wehmeyer, L., Lee, B.-S., Marwedel, P.: Assigning program and data objects to scratchpad for energy reduction. In: Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference and Exhibition, pp. 409–415. IEEE (2002)
Taherdoost, H.: How to design and create an effective survey/questionnaire; a step by step guide. Int. J. Acad. Res. Manage. (IJARM) 5(4), 37–41 (2016)
Taina, J.: How green is your software? In: Tyrväinen, P., Jansen, S., Cusumano, M.A. (eds.) ICSOB 2010. LNBIP, vol. 51, pp. 151–162. Springer, Heidelberg (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13633-7_13
Thiagarajan, N., Aggarwal, G., Nicoara, A., Boneh, D., Singh, J.P.: Who killed my battery? Analyzing mobile browser energy consumption. In: Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 41–50 (2012)
White, D.R., Clark, J., Jacob, J., Poulding, S.M.: Searching for resource-efficient programs: low-power pseudorandom number generators. In: Proceedings of the 10th Annual Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation, pp. 1775–1782 (2008)
Wiedmann, T., Minx, J.: A definition of ‘carbon footprint’. Ecol. Econ. Res. Trends 1(2008), 1–11 (2008)
Zhu, Y., Reddi, V.J.: High-performance and energy-efficient mobile web browsing on big/little systems. In: 2013 IEEE 19th International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA), pp. 13–24. IEEE (2013)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Lyu, H., Gay, G., Sakamoto, M. (2024). Developer Views on Software Carbon Footprint and Its Potential for Automated Reduction. In: Arcaini, P., Yue, T., Fredericks, E.M. (eds) Search-Based Software Engineering. SSBSE 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14415. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48796-5_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48796-5_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-48795-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-48796-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)