A First Approach on Legacy System Energy Consumption Measurement

Nowadays, software sustainability is growing in importance. Not only IT infrastructure is becoming greener, but also software. It is possible to find methods and methodologies intended to produce more sustainable software with lower power consumption. In spite the slow evolution of software engineering towards " Green software", there exist a huge amount of legacy systems still running in organizations. Is then necessary to develop such systems from scratch in order to make them more sustainable? Probably, the most logical and appropriate answer for this question is no, since existing software can be refactored in order to improve its green ability quality characteristic. As a first step towards power consumption improvement, the authors propose a tool to analyze legacy systems in order to detect parts of the system with higher energy consumption. Using the profiling technique, the proposed tool instrument legacy Java systems in order to keep track of its execution. This information, together with the energy consumption (logged by means a data logger hardware), enables the engineer to analyze legacy system consumption detecting energy peaks in the system (e.g. The PC). The analysis gives the engineer evidences about candidates to be refactored in order to reduce energy consumption.