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

Priyavanshi Pathania, Rohit Mehra, Vibhu Saujanya Sharma, Vikrant Kaulgud, Sanjay Podder, Adam P. Burden

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 sustainability-related 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.