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Investigating the Correlation between Performance Scores and Energy Consumption of Mobile Web Apps

Published: 17 April 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Context. Developers have access to tools like Google Lighthouse to assess the performance of web apps and to guide the adoption of development best practices. However, when it comes to energy consumption of mobile web apps, these tools seem to be lacking. Goal. This study investigates on the correlation between the performance scores produced by Lighthouse and the energy consumption of mobile web apps.
Method. We design and conduct an empirical experiment where 21 real mobile web apps are (i) analyzed via the Lighthouse performance analysis tool and (ii) measured on an Android device running a software-based energy profiler. Then, we statistically assess how energy consumption correlates with the obtained performance scores and carry out an effect size estimation.
Results. We discover a statistically significant negative correlation between performance scores and the energy consumption of mobile web apps (with medium to large effect sizes), implying that an increase of the performance score tend to lead to a decrease of energy consumption.
Conclusions. We recommend developers to strive to improve the performance level of their mobile web apps, as this can also have a positive impact on their energy consumption on Android devices.

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      cover image ACM Other conferences
      EASE '20: Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering
      April 2020
      544 pages
      ISBN:9781450377317
      DOI:10.1145/3383219
      • General Chairs:
      • Jingyue Li,
      • Letizia Jaccheri,
      • Program Chairs:
      • Torgeir Dingsøyr,
      • Ruzanna Chitchyan
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Publication History

      Published: 17 April 2020

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      Author Tags

      1. Mobile app development
      2. requirements elicitation
      3. requirements engineering

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      • (2024)CAWALInformation Processing and Management: an International Journal10.1016/j.ipm.2023.10361761:3Online publication date: 2-Jul-2024
      • (2023)JavaScript Dead Code Identification, Elimination, and Empirical AssessmentIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2023.326784849:7(3692-3714)Online publication date: Jul-2023
      • (2023)Energy-Saving Strategies for Mobile Web Apps and their Measurement: Results from a Decade of Research2023 IEEE/ACM 10th International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems (MOBILESoft)10.1109/MOBILSoft59058.2023.00017(75-86)Online publication date: May-2023
      • (2023)Native vs Web Apps: Comparing the Energy Consumption and Performance of Android Apps and their Web Counterparts2023 IEEE/ACM 10th International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems (MOBILESoft)10.1109/MOBILSoft59058.2023.00013(44-54)Online publication date: May-2023
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