Mining questions about software energy consumption

A growing number of software solutions have been proposed to address application-level energy consumption problems in the last few years. However, little is known about how much software developers are concerned about energy consump-tion, what aspects of energy consumption they consider im-portant, and what solutions they have in mind for improving energy efficiency. In this paper we present the first empir-ical study on understanding the views of application pro-grammers on software energy consumption problems. Using StackOverflow as our primary data source, we analyze a carefully curated sample of more than 300 questions and 550 answers from more than 800 users. With this data, we observed a number of interesting findings. Our study shows that practitioners are aware of the energy consumption prob-lems: the questions they ask are not only diverse – we found 5 main themes of questions – but also often more interest-ing and challenging when compared to the control question set. Even though energy consumption-related questions are popular when considering a number of different popularity measures, the same cannot be said about the quality of their answers. In addition, we observed that some of these an-swers are often flawed or vague. We contrast the advice provided by these answers with the state-of-the-art research on energy consumption. Our summary of software energy consumption problems may help researchers focus on what matters the most to software developers and end users