Refactoring for Energy Efficiency: A Reflection on the State of the Art

Recent refactoring research introduced several innovations addressing diverse goals, such code extensibility, reusability, and testability. However, energy consumption, a critical property of any software system, remains unaddressed by refactoring research. In this paper, we provide an accounting of some of the recent and successful state-of-the-art research on software energy consumption. Through an investigation on premiere software engineering venues, we identify and discuss 12 contributions that can be further instantiated in refactoring tools used to improve software energy efficiency -- and the challenges behind this process. These opportunities span a wide range of software characteristics, such as mobile applications and concurrent programming. Mobile applications is the topic with the greatest number of opportunities (6 out of 11). The study serves as a call to action for refactoring researchers interested in software energy consumption issues.