Integration and Unit Testing of Software Energy Consumption

The study of software energy consumption is gaining more importance due to the increasing use of portable devices that run on batteries. Moreover, there is a growing trend in the value of the carbon footprint of computational energy, which rises environmental and social concerns. Energy consumption can be viewed as a part of software performance testing. A key problem in performance testing in general, and energy consumption in particular, is finding expected values for test cases, known also as the oracle problem. These values are hard to find or estimate. In this article, we present an approach for energy testing that uses method's size, complexity, and dependency for estimating method's energy consumption (unit testing). The estimation of energy consumption of a test case depends on the accumulative energy consumed by the methods executed in the test case. The cost of the proposed approach is low as it does not require generating extra test cases as well as it can be performed when the software functionality is validated.