A Validated Taxonomy on Software Energy Smells

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive, validated taxonomy of software energy smells, supported by empirical data from Python code profiling, to aid developers in reducing software energy consumption.

Contribution

It presents a novel, validated taxonomy of energy smells, classifies root causes, and provides an empirical dataset for energy-efficient software engineering.

Findings

71% of code samples exhibit multiple co-occurring energy smells

Memory-related smells offer the highest energy savings when fixed

Energy optimization involves factors beyond performance, such as power draw variation

Abstract

As software proliferates across domains, its aggregate energy footprint has become a major concern. To reduce software's growing environmental footprint, developers need to identify and refactor energy smells: source code implementations, design choices, or programming practices that lead to inefficient use of computing resources. Existing catalogs of such smells are either domain-specific, limited to performance anti-patterns, lack fine-grained root cause classification, or remain unvalidated against measured energy data. In this paper, we present a comprehensive, language-agnostic, taxonomy of software energy smells. Through a systematic literature review of 60 papers and exhaustive snowballing, we coded 320 inefficiency patterns into 12 primary energy smells and 65 root causes mapped to the primary smells. To empirically validate this taxonomy, we profile over 21,000 functionally equivalent Python code pairs for energy, time, and memory, and classified the top 3000 pairs by energy difference using a multi-step LLM pipeline, mapping 55 of the 65 root causes to real code. The analysis reveals that 71% of samples exhibit multiple co-occurring smells, memory-related smells yield the highest per-fix energy savings, while power draw variation across patterns confirms that energy optimization cannot be reduced to performance optimization alone. Along with the taxonomy, we release the labeled dataset, including energy profiles and reasoning traces, to the community. Together, they provide a shared vocabulary, actionable refactoring guidelines, and an empirical foundation for energy smell detection, energy-efficient code generation, and green software engineering at large.