How Software Design Affects Energy Performance: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Interest in the energy consumption of software has grown with rising energy costs and greater environmental awareness. Many approaches to research in this area have been proposed, from the examination of hardware and compiler optimizations to platform specific software modifications. However, the impact of general software design on energy efficiency remains unclear. The goal of this research is to summarize the findings of studies that empirically examine the impact of design patterns, code smells, and refactorings (which we collectively describe as design elements) on energy consumption. Our secondary goal is to provide an overview of the impact of these aspects of software design on energy performance and discuss the current state of the art. We present a systematic literature review (SLR) of papers that examine the impact of the aforementioned design elements on energy consumption. We perform a search through four major databases, a manual search through publications of eight conferences and five journals from 2010 through 2023, in addition to snowballing. We extract relevant data from the literature and present an overview of each experiment's setup, the data reported, and results for each design element studied. Beginning with a set of 8684 papers, we select 24 that include studies of these design elements. Overall, they provide data on 22 design patterns, 17 code smells, and 31 refactorings. Many studies are preliminary in nature, and contradictory findings are frequent. We present three main findings: (i) a wide array of design patterns, code smells, and refactorings have been examined from an energy performance perspective; (ii) many of these studies are preliminary in nature and indicate the need for further research; (iii) there has been little growth recently in publications empirically examining these aspects of software design.