Sustainability

These days, IT is increasingly resource-intensive, both in terms of hardware and energy consumption. As a result, the sustainable side of software is an increasingly studied topic in the software engineering community. However, developers have little knowledge of how to write and develop software in a more sustainable way. The aim of this thesis is to find out how to help developers write green code. The more precise subject is to be defined with the developers. The internship is done in the Software Engineering Research Group (SERG) at TU Delft in the Netherlands.

Energy efficiency in computing is an important subject that is increasingly being addressed by researchers and developers. Nowadays, the majority of websites are built using the Wordpress CMS, while other developers prefer to use more secure and energy-efficient site generators. This study focuses on the server-side energy consumption of these two methods of creating websites. A detailed analysis of the results will make it possible to identify borderline cases and suggest recommendations on the best technology to use, depending on the type of project.

In recent years, sustainability concerns have emerged in the software engineering community. However, little research focuses on the link between the evolution of a source code and energy consumption. Consequently, most developers don’t know the energy consumption of their software during its development. To address this problem, we want to build a theory that binds the evolution of a source code to its energy consumption profile. This relies on the measurement of the energy consumption evolution of multiple projects using repository mining approaches, the analysis of the reasons for this evolution, the design of proper data visualization to make this information available for the developers, and the evaluation of these objectives through the development of a framework for developers. This theory and the associated framework may help developers have better knowledge of the energy consumption evolution of their software and tools to reduce its consumption.