Methods and systems are provided for developing a power management strategy for an application as the application is developed. These methods and systems broadly provide for building the application incorporating a power management module operable to provide several power management methods, capturing power consumption data of the application as it is executed on a target system, accepting modifications to the application to use one or more of the power management methods, and repeating these steps as needed. A power scaling library may also be incorporated in the application and the application may be modified to use the dynamic frequency and voltage scaling functionality provided by the power scaling library.