Overviewing the liveness of refactoring for energy efficiency

Abstract

Mobile device users have been growing in the last years but the limited battery life of these devices is considered one of the major issues amongst users and programmers. Therefore, there is a need to guide developers in developing mobile applications in the most energy efficient way. One of the ways to improve this is to provide live feedback about the energy efficiency of a program while it's being programmed. We have analyzed and compared a total of 16 different tools and presented a list of 15 code smells and respective refactorings. From the analyzed tools, Leafactor is the closest to a valid solution to our problem because it's the only energy-aware tool with the highest liveness level. However, in order to be executed the programmer needs to trigger it on the IDE by selecting the file, instead of automatically being executed without the programmer being noticed and refactor his inefficient code.