Analyzing the Harmful Effect of God Class Refactoring on Power Consumption

Energy efficiency and other sustainability issues are common concerns in the material production industries but rarely addressed in software development efforts. Instead, traditional software development life cycles and methodologies place an emphasis on maintainability and other intrinsic software quality features. One standard practice is to improve maintainability by detecting bad smells in a system´s architecture and then applying refactoring transformations to deal with those smells. The refactoring research area is sufficiently mature for most techniques to achieve more maintainable system architectures, but the authors argue that they can also lead to both decreased sustainability and increased power consumption. Accordingly, this article analyzes the relationship between architecture sustainability and maintainability by providing empirical evidence of how power consumption increases after refactoring.