Grupo Alarcos · Book chapter · 2019
Assessing the Sustainability of Software Products—A Method Comparison
Javier Mancebo Pavón, Achim Guldner, Eva Kern, Philipp Kesseler, Sandro Kreten, Félix Óscar García Rubio, Coral Calero Muñoz, Stefan Naumann
As part of Green IT, the field of green software engineering has seen a rise in interest over the past years. Several methods for assessing the energy efficiency of software were devised, which are partially based upon rather different approaches and partially come to similar conclusions. In this paper, we take an in-depth look at two methods for assessing the resource consumption that is induced by software. We describe the methods along a case study, where we measured five sorting algorithms and compared them in terms of similarities, differences and synergies. We show that even though the methods use different measurement approaches (intrusive vs. non-intrusive), the results are indeed comparable and combining the methods can improve the findings.