Luís Cruz and Rui Abreu, both researchers at INESC-ID (in the Information and Decision Support Systems research area) won a Best Paper Award at the XXI Ibero-American Conference on Software Engineering SET Track, with the paper “Using Automatic Refactoring to Improve Energy Efficiency of Android Apps”.

The winning article consider that  the ever-growing popularity of mobile phones has brought additional challenges to the software development life-cycle. Mobile applications (apps, for short) ought to provide the same set of features as conventional software, with limited resources: such as, limited processing capabilities, storage, screen and, not less important, power source. Although energy efficiency is a valuable requirement, developers often lack knowledge of best practices. In this paper, we study whether or not automatic refactoring can aid developers ship energy efficient apps. We leverage a tool, Leafactor, with five energy code smells that tend to go unnoticed. We use Leafactor to analyze code smells in 140 free and open source apps. As a result, we detected and fixed code smells in 45 apps, from which 40% have successfully merged our changes into the official repository.

The main objective of this leading research forum on Software Engineering (SE) in Ibero-America is to promote high-quality scientific research in Ibero-American countries, thus supporting the researchers in this community in publishing and discussing their work. In addition, the conference fosters collaboration and cross-fertilization among software academics, students, and industry.

The Conference took place at  Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, between 23rd and 27th of April.