Do Energy-Oriented Changes Hinder Maintainability?

2019 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME) Pub Date : 2019-08-22 DOI:10.1109/ICSME.2019.00013

Luis Cruz, R. Abreu, J. Grundy, Li Li, Xin Xia

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引用次数: 23

Abstract

Energy efficiency is a crucial quality requirement for mobile applications. However, improving energy efficiency is far from trivial as developers lack the knowledge and tools to aid in this activity. In this paper we study the impact of changes to improve energy efficiency on the maintainability of Android applications. Using a dataset containing 539 energy efficiency-oriented commits, we measure maintainability – as computed by the Software Improvement Group's web-based source code analysis service Better Code Hub (BCH) – before and after energy efficiency-related code changes. Results show that in general improving energy efficiency comes with a significant decrease in maintainability. This is particularly evident in code changes to accommodate the Power Save Mode and Wakelock Addition energy patterns. In addition, we perform manual analysis to assess how real examples of energy-oriented changes affect maintainability. Our results help mobile app developers to 1) avoid common maintainability issues when improving the energy efficiency of their apps; and 2) adopt development processes to build maintainable and energy-efficient code. We also support researchers by identifying challenges in mobile app development that still need to be addressed.

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以能源为导向的改变会阻碍可维护性吗?

能源效率是移动应用程序的关键质量要求。然而，提高能源效率远非微不足道，因为开发人员缺乏知识和工具来帮助开展这项活动。在本文中，我们研究了提高能源效率的变化对Android应用程序的可维护性的影响。使用包含539个面向能效的提交的数据集，我们测量了与能效相关的代码更改前后的可维护性——由软件改进组基于web的源代码分析服务Better code Hub (BCH)计算得出。结果表明，总体而言，能源效率的提高伴随着可维护性的显著降低。这在代码更改中尤其明显，以适应省电模式和Wakelock附加能量模式。此外，我们执行手动分析，以评估面向能源的更改的实际示例如何影响可维护性。我们的研究结果可以帮助移动应用开发者:1)在提高应用的能效时避免常见的可维护性问题;2)采用开发流程来构建可维护和节能的代码。我们还通过识别移动应用开发中仍需解决的挑战来支持研究人员。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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2019 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)

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