Can We Spot Energy Regressions Using Developers' Tests? An Industrial Replication

Producing energy-efficient software is gaining increasing attention in both industry and research communities. In this context, the company Berger-Levrault, an international software publisher, aims to better understand and monitor the energy behaviour of its software systems to support the development of more energy-efficient products. However, achieving this objective remains challenging because developers lack feedback mechanisms that show how their implementation and testing choices affect the software system's energy consumption.To address this limitation, the literature highlights a notable study that could serve as a foundation for Berger-Levrault to enhance developers' energy awareness. This study investigated whether developers' test suites can detect energy regressions in Continuous Integration (CI) environments. Our goal is to evaluate if its findings hold in a real-world setting and to provide further evidence on the feasibility and reliability of detecting energy regressions using developers' test suites in practical CI workflows. The results confirm that developers' tests can reliably identify energy regressions while maintaining stable performance and energy metrics. Finally, the approach enabled the classification of changes across commits and the manual validation of detected regressions, reinforcing its feasibility and reliability in an industrial context.