Using Automatic Refactoring to Improve Energy Efficiency of Android Apps

• Type: Article in International Conference Proceedings Book
• Date: 2018

Authors

Cruz, L (Author) Other; Rui Abreu (Author) FEUP

Conference proceedings International

Title: Proceedings of the XXI Iberoamerican Conference on Software Engineering, Bogota, Colombia, April 23-27, 2018.

Pages: 163-176

Indexing

Scopus - 0 Citations

Other information

Authenticus ID: P-00N-V5H

Abstract (EN): The ever-growing popularity of mobile phones has brought additional challenges to the software development lifecycle. Mobile applications (apps, for short) ought to provide the same set of features as conventional software, with limited resources: Such as, limited processing capabilities, storage, screen and, not less important, power source. Although energy efficiency is a valuable requirement, developers often lack knowledge of best practices. In this paper, we study whether or not automatic refactoring can aid developers ship energy efficient apps. We leverage a tool, Leafactor, with five energy code smells that tend to go unnoticed. We use Leafactor to analyze code smells in 140 free and open source apps. As a result, we detected and fixed code smells in 45 apps, from which 40% have successfully merged our changes into the official repository.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific