Methodological Guidelines for Measuring Energy Consumption of Software Applications

Energy consumption information for devices, as available in the literature, is typically obtained with ad hoc approaches, thus making replication and consumption data comparison difficult. We propose a process for measuring the energy consumption of a software application. The process contains four phases, each providing a structured deliverable that reports the information required to replicate the measurement. The process also guides the researcher on a threat to validity analysis to be included in each deliverable. This analysis ensures better reliability, trust, and confidence to reuse the collected consumption data. Such a process produces a structured consumption data for any kind of electronic device (IoT devices, mobile phones, personal computers, servers, etc.), which can be published and shared with other researchers fostering comparison or further investigations. A real case example demonstrates how to apply the process and how to create the required deliverables.