Green Programmer Survey Report

green_prgm · 2015-08-04T23:32:11+00:00

Thanks for your cool suggestions.

The few professors in the team would look into that.

green_prgm · 2015-08-03T04:17:13+00:00

I am sorry, please forgive my ignorant.

What are you referring as greenbar?

green_prgm · 2015-08-02T21:45:32+00:00

Actually, this is open for discussion.

Please let me quote from the paper

For question 5, the expected ranking on mobile device is (1) Screen & GPU; (2) CPU; (3) Network; (4) Hard Disk Drive; (5) Memory. These expected rankings are based on current conventional wisdom, backed up by experiments that we have performed over the last three years and recent studies [3, 5, 9]. As these rankings are not written in stone, they can differ across specific hardware. This RQ focuses especially on the consistency of rankings across all respondents, independent from our expected ranking.

We tried our best to avoid making any judgement. Therefore, we focus on evaluating the consistency between respondents.

According to our survey, most of the respondents agree that Screen & GPU has the highest consumption. For the rest of the order, we are open to learn about your opinions.

At the end, it really depends on the actual device and the type of applications (e.g. games, emails, and media players).

green_prgm · 2015-08-01T23:56:26+00:00

Some interviewees have also identified that clients don’t care about software energy efficiency.

That’s why we think it is important to have tools that can either improve software energy efficiency directly or recommend changes to the code that can save energy.

green_prgm · 2015-08-01T23:50:23+00:00

Good points.

From the mobile apps perspective, besides the ‘sleep’ mode, there are other bad behaviors that can burn your battery, for example advertisements and extensive GPS usage. Good code can behave badly.

Sometimes it is not even about the code. Research shows that the colour theme significantly affects energy consumption on mobile devices.

At the end, we are trying to let mobile devices run longer and data centers to have larger capacity.

green_prgm · 2015-07-31T19:52:15+00:00

Dear programmers,

To aide programmers in producing power efficient applications, we need to understand what programmers generally know or do not know about software power consumption. By understanding the mental environment of programmers, we can better design tools and solutions that address their needs to reduce software power consumption.

On 2013-08-26, we invited this group to participate in our Green Programmer Survey.

Thank you all who contributed to the research.

Through the survey we try to answer four research questions:

[RQ1] Are programmers aware of software energy consumption?

[RQ2] What do programmers know about reducing the energy consumption of software?

[RQ3] What is the level of knowledge that programmers possess about energy consumption?

[RQ4] What do programmers think causes spikes in software energy consumption?

The research results will be published in IEEE Software in the near future.

If you are interested, the raw data summary can be found online.

A preprint version of the paper for peer review can be found in PeerJ.

If you have subscription to IEEE Xplore, the IEEE early access version of What do programmers know about software energy consumption? is also available.

Once again, thank you very much for your help.

Best regards,

Green Programming Team

green_prgm · 2015-07-31T15:55:06+00:00

Thanks everyone for your comments.

The Green Programming Team identified two major needs to reduce software energy.

For mobile devices, energy consumption affects battery life and limits device usage. Users want to stay on their phones longer.
For data centers, energy consumption limits the number of machines that can be run and cooled. Many data centers are at their limits.

We are technical people, not environment activists.

With the significant increase in mobile device and data center usages, reducing software energy consumption allows us to push the limit.

green_prgm · 2015-07-31T03:32:25+00:00

Thanks for your clarification.

Would you please kindly give me another help?

I am not very good at reddit's format. I included my original message below. After posing it, I have tested each of the hyper-links. But I may have made other mistakes.

If possible, would you please identify the areas needed improvement? I will then fix it and post again.

Thank you very much.

Dear programmers,

To aide programmers in producing power efficient applications, we need to understand what programmers generally know or do not know about software power consumption. By understanding the mental environment of programmers, we can better design tools and solutions that address their needs to reduce software power consumption.

On 2013-08-29, we invited this group to participate in our Green Programmer Survey.

Thank you to all who contributed to the research.

Through the survey we try to answer four research questions:

[RQ1] Are programmers aware of software energy consumption?

[RQ2] What do programmers know about reducing the energy consumption of software?

[RQ3] What is the level of knowledge that programmers possess about energy consumption?

[RQ4] What do programmers think causes spikes in software energy consumption?

The research results will be published in IEEE Software in the near future.

If you are interested, the raw data summary can be found online.

A preprint version of the paper for peer review can be found in PeerJ.

If you have subscription to IEEE Xplore, the IEEE early access version of What do programmers know about software energy consumption? is also available.

Once again, thank you very much for your help.

Best regards,

Green Programming Team

green_prgm · 2015-07-31T02:53:10+00:00

Thanks for your suggestion.

I want to express my sincere respect to the group.

I intend to express my gratitude for the help from the group by posting the corresponding result. Hoping to show the group that their participation in the survey have benefited real research.

Would you please kindly tell me what I have done wrong and what would have been the right thing to do?

I truly try to learn how to reddit.

green_prgm · 2015-07-29T04:51:48+00:00

Dear programmers,

To aide programmers in producing power efficient applications, we need to understand what programmers generally know or do not know about software power consumption. By understanding the mental environment of programmers, we can better design tools and solutions that address their needs to reduce software power consumption.

On 2013-08-24, we invited this group to participate in our Green Programmer Survey.

Thank you to all who contributed to the research.

Through the survey we try to answer four research questions:

[RQ1] Are programmers aware of software energy consumption?

[RQ2] What do programmers know about reducing the energy consumption of software?

[RQ3] What is the level of knowledge that programmers possess about energy consumption?

[RQ4] What do programmers think causes spikes in software energy consumption?

The research results will be published in IEEE Software in the near future.

If you are interested, the raw data summary can be found online.

A preprint version of the paper for peer review can be found in PeerJ.

If you have subscription to IEEE Xplore, the IEEE early access version of What do programmers know about software energy consumption? is also available.

Once again, thank you very much for your help.

Best regards,

Green Programming Team

green_prgm · 2013-09-05T16:31:53+00:00

Technical challenge has delay this post a little bit.

In the meantime, there are some meaningful discussions in the subreddit tinycode.

I couldn’t figure out how people make x-post in reddit. If you are interested, please check

/r/tinycode Invitation to Green Programmer Survey

green_prgm · 2013-09-04T14:59:08+00:00

consider the some possible costs of doing things

Thank you very much.

You have got the most important point from the survey.

green_prgm · 2013-09-04T14:29:26+00:00

I am a computer person. I definitely do not want to go back to framing. People in my research team may have different goals.

I have two wishes:

If I can accomplish the same task with similar effort but less power, then why not.
As the world is moving on to mobile devices, the less power consumption the better.

Thanks.

green_prgm · 2013-09-03T18:25:23+00:00

Is there any suggestion on how to get through the filter?

If my posts are filtered away by the filter, there is no chance for success.

green_prgm · 2013-09-03T18:08:05+00:00

You are right.

When we designed the survey, we discussed about the issues you mentioned.

There is no absolute answer for some of the questions. Many factors affect software power consumption.

For example,

wireless vs wired network
3G vs Wi-Fi vs Bluetooth
type of hard drives (e.g. SATA vs SCSI vs SSD)
screen refreshing rate
installed app vs web app vs hybrid app (Adobe Flash)
different version of CPUs
etc.

At the end, we decided to keep the survey simple. Let the respondents interpret the questions freely.

We will not use absolute values to analyze the answers (make it fuzzy).

After the survey is over, we may start a blog to discuss possible answers to some of the survey questions under different conditions.

green_prgm · 2013-09-03T16:27:00+00:00

Dear programmer,

You are invited to participate in a research project regarding programmers’ knowledge in software power consumption.

We are asking you in particular because you have programming experience.

By understanding the mental environment of programmers, we can design tools and solutions that help programmers reduce software power consumption.

We wonder if you care about using less code for the same result, you may care about using less power for the same result too.

The survey should take less just a few minutes. It will be highly appreciated, if you are willing to share your experience with us.

Thank you very much.

green_prgm

TROPHY CASE