Towards a Knowledge Base of Common Sustainability Weaknesses in Green Software Development

TL;DR

This paper emphasizes the importance of creating a standardized knowledge base of sustainability weaknesses in software to develop automated tools that promote greener coding practices, highlighting initial proposals and experiments.

Contribution

It proposes the development of a standardized knowledge base for sustainability weaknesses in software and demonstrates the challenges in adapting existing weakness knowledge to sustainability contexts.

Findings

Existing software weakness knowledge cannot be directly applied to sustainability without significant modifications.

Preliminary experiments show the need for specialized sustainability-focused weakness classification.

Highlights the importance of standardization for automated green software development tools.

Abstract

With the climate crisis looming, engineering sustainable software systems become crucial to optimize resource utilization, minimize environmental impact, and foster a greener, more resilient digital ecosystem. For developers, getting access to automated tools that analyze code and suggest sustainabilityrelated optimizations becomes extremely important from a learning and implementation perspective. However, there is currently a dearth of such tools due to the lack of standardized knowledge, which serves as the foundation of these tools. In this paper, we motivate the need for the development of a standard knowledge base of commonly occurring sustainability weaknesses in code, and propose an initial way of doing that. Furthermore, through preliminary experiments, we demonstrate why existing knowledge regarding software weaknesses cannot be re-tagged "as is" to sustainability without significant due diligence, thereby urging further explorations in this ecologically significant domain.