Assessing the environmental impact of mobile applications: a measure framework toward DevGreenOps

Status:: 🟩
Links:: Greenspector GreenOps Measure power usage of website frontend features within a web browser Measure energy consumption of mobile software applications

Metadata

Authors:: Guégain, Edouard
Title:: Assessing the environmental impact of mobile applications: a measure framework toward DevGreenOps
Date:: 2024
Publisher:: Association for Computing Machinery
URL:: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3647632.3651391
DOI:: 10.1145/3647632.3651391

Keywords:: []

Notes & Annotations

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📑 Annotations (imported on 2024-09-14#16:11:06)

guegain.2024.assessingenvironmentalimpactmobileapplications

In this paper, we argue that measuring the energy and data usage of mobile applications during realistic user journeys is necessary to assess their environmental impact. Such measurements must be performed during usage scenarios that are representative of human usage. In addition, the performance of applications must be measured on physical devices, as virtual devices may not properly replicate the performance of physical ones. Then, such performance data must be aggregated as a unique criterion to decide whether the environmental impact of a given application improved or regressed after any change to the source code.

guegain.2024.assessingenvironmentalimpactmobileapplications (pg. 2)

This framework contains four components. First, a tool allows for creating user journeys replicating human usage of the application. Then, a measure protocol is defined to monitor the application’s performance during such user journeys. The results of such measures are then centralized and processed in a data visualization platform, Greenspector Studio. The final component of this framework is a control tool, Greenspector CLI, used to launch the execution of the test suites. This section details the usage and capabilities of such components.

guegain.2024.assessingenvironmentalimpactmobileapplications (pg. 2)

While executing the application on virtual devices would provide metrics regarding the data usage, their energy consumption can not be assumed to properly replicate physical devices. Therefore, all performance assessments are performed on actual devices.

guegain.2024.assessingenvironmentalimpactmobileapplications (pg. 2)

The data usage is leveraged to estimate the impact of network and servers.

guegain.2024.assessingenvironmentalimpactmobileapplications (pg. 3)

A second limitation of this framework lies in the focus on the end-user’s devices. The impacts of the application on server and network infrastructure are not measured but only estimated through data usage.

guegain.2024.assessingenvironmentalimpactmobileapplications (pg. 3)

For instance, in [5], the authors developed a functionally identical application with five different development frameworks. After monitoring the battery and data usage and the size of such applications, the authors discuss the impact of each development framework on performance. Such usage of our framework can assist the decision process, both when designing new software services from scratch and when comparing possible implementations of a given feature during development. Such a usage fits into the "monitor", "plan", and "code" steps of a DevOps methodology.