Visualizing the Energy Footprint of a Software Development Environment

Energy consumption is a major area of interest in Green IT, in particular when looking at how technology can affect the world's energy footprint. Sustainable software engineering is another growing field which takes a critical look at the way in which we build software, including the environmental impacts of software construction. In this thesis, I address the energy aspect of sustainable software engineering by investigating how energy data in a software development environment can be effectively obtained and communicated to developers. The aim is to present methods through which developers can gain access to energy data, enabling them to identify what major energy sinks in their software development environment are. I begin by reviewing literature in green IT, software engineering and sustainable software engineering in order to understand what the state of the art is of technology geared towards both energy awareness and software metric awareness. I present design recommendations for how to consolidate and visualize energy data from the network. It is described in two parts: The consolidation tool begins with some technical background and ends with a prototype implementation for a Linux computer. The visualization section presents a set of design recommendations for an energy dashboard that is then exemplified through a set of high resolution dashboard mockups.