Measuring and visualizing energy consumption within software code

The authors have begun to witness an exponential growth in the information and communication technologies (ICT) sector. While undoubtedly a milestone, all of this occurs at the expense of high energy costs needed to supply servers, data centers, and any use of computers. Associated with these high energy costs is the emission of greenhouse gases. These two issues have become major problems in society. The ICT sector contributes up to 8% of the overall energy consumption, with 50% of the energy costs of an organization being attributed to the IT departments.The paper discusses a tool which applies the proposed techniques on software code. This tool would guide the developer into programming more energy-aware software by alerting him/her of red smells, and offering green refactorings, all this in a simple visual layout to allow the software developer to become energy-aware. This application will also provide the ability to navigate between less energy efficient areas (packages, classes, modules, functions, methods, blocks and even lines), making its implementation more energy efficient.