Causes, impacts, and detection approaches of code smell: a survey

Code smells are anomalies often generated in design, implementation or maintenance phase of software development life cycle. Researchers established several catalogues characterizing the smells. Fowler and Beck developed the most popular catalogue of 22 smells covering varieties of development issues. This literature presents an overview of the existing research conducted on these 22 smells. Our motivation is to represent these smells with an easier interpretation for the software developers, determine the causes that generate these issues in applications and their impact from different aspects of software maintenance. This paper also highlights previous and recent research on smell detection with an effort to categorize the approaches based on the underlying concept.

[1]  Girish Suryanarayana,et al.  Towards a Principle-based Classification of Structural Design Smells , 2013, J. Object Technol..

[2]  Mika Mäntylä,et al.  Bad smells - humans as code critics , 2004, 20th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance, 2004. Proceedings..

[3]  Mauricio A. Saca.  Refactoring improving the design of existing code , 2017, 2017 IEEE 37th Central America and Panama Convention (CONCAPAN XXXVII).

[4]  Mika Mäntylä,et al.  A taxonomy and an initial empirical study of bad smells in code , 2003, International Conference on Software Maintenance, 2003. ICSM 2003. Proceedings..

[5]  Joc Sanders,et al.  Software quality - a framework for success in software development and support , 1994 .

[6]  Arthur J. Riel,et al.  Object-Oriented Design Heuristics , 1996 .

[7]  Aiko Fallas Yamashita,et al.  Do developers care about code smells? An exploratory survey , 2013, 2013 20th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE).

[8]  Aiko Fallas Yamashita,et al.  Do code smells reflect important maintainability aspects? , 2012, 2012 28th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM).

[9]  Gabriele Bavota,et al.  Do They Really Smell Bad? A Study on Developers' Perception of Bad Code Smells , 2014, 2014 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution.

[10]  Michele Lanza,et al.  Object-Oriented Metrics in Practice - Using Software Metrics to Characterize, Evaluate, and Improve the Design of Object-Oriented Systems , 2006 .

[11]  Miryung Kim,et al.  An empirical study of code clone genealogies , 2005, ESEC/FSE-13.

[12]  Andy Zaidman,et al.  Evaluating the Lifespan of Code Smells using Software Repository Mining , 2012, 2012 16th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering.

[13]  M.J. Munro,et al.  Product Metrics for Automatic Identification of "Bad Smell" Design Problems in Java Source-Code , 2005, 11th IEEE International Software Metrics Symposium (METRICS'05).

[14]  Bruce F. Webster,et al.  Pitfalls of object-oriented development , 1995 .

[15]  Foutse Khomh,et al.  Do Code Smells Impact the Effort of Different Maintenance Programming Activities? , 2016, 2016 IEEE 23rd International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering (SANER).

[16]  Raed Shatnawi,et al.  An empirical study of the bad smells and class error probability in the post-release object-oriented system evolution , 2007, J. Syst. Softw..

[17]  Dror G. Feitelson,et al.  High-MCC Functions in the Linux Kernel , 2012, 2012 20th IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC).

[18]  Carl G. Davis,et al.  A Hierarchical Model for Object-Oriented Design Quality Assessment , 2002, IEEE Trans. Software Eng..

[19]  Foutse Khomh,et al.  An Exploratory Study of the Impact of Code Smells on Software Change-proneness , 2009, 2009 16th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering.

[20]  Akito Monden,et al.  Software quality analysis by code clones in industrial legacy software , 2002, Proceedings Eighth IEEE Symposium on Software Metrics.

[21]  Douglas C. Schmidt,et al.  Pattern Oriented Software Architecture: On Patterns and Pattern Languages (Wiley Software Patterns Series) , 2007 .

[22]  Gabriele Bavota,et al.  Mining Version Histories for Detecting Code Smells , 2015, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[23]  Forrest Shull,et al.  Detecting defects in object-oriented designs: using reading techniques to increase software quality , 1999, OOPSLA '99.

[24]  Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc,et al.  DECOR: A Method for the Specification and Detection of Code and Design Smells , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[25]  Beijun Shen,et al.  Code Bad Smell Detection through Evolutionary Data Mining , 2015, 2015 ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM).

[26]  Standard Glossary of Software Engineering Terminology , 1990 .

[27]  Chris F. Kemerer,et al.  A Metrics Suite for Object Oriented Design , 2015, IEEE Trans. Software Eng..

[28]  Leon Moonen,et al.  Java quality assurance by detecting code smells , 2002, Ninth Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, 2002. Proceedings..

[29]  Mika Mäntylä,et al.  Comparing and experimenting machine learning techniques for code smell detection , 2015, Empirical Software Engineering.

[30]  Raed Shatnawi,et al.  An Investigation of Bad Smells in Object-Oriented Design , 2006, Third International Conference on Information Technology: New Generations (ITNG'06).

[31]  Richard Levins,et al.  Why Programs Fail , 2010 .

[32]  Bartosz Walter,et al.  The relationship between design patterns and code smells: An exploratory study , 2016, Inf. Softw. Technol..

[33]  Premkumar T. Devanbu,et al.  Clones: what is that smell? , 2010, 2010 7th IEEE Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2010).

[34]  Meir M. Lehman,et al.  Program evolution: processes of software change , 1985 .

[35]  Michel Wermelinger,et al.  Assessing the effect of clones on changeability , 2008, 2008 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance.

[36]  A. Yamashita,et al.  Exploring the impact of inter-smell relations on software maintainability: An empirical study , 2013, 2013 35th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE).

[37]  Audris Mockus,et al.  Quantifying the Effect of Code Smells on Maintenance Effort , 2013, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[38]  Mika Mäntylä,et al.  Code Smell Detection: Towards a Machine Learning-Based Approach , 2013, 2013 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance.

[39]  Elmar Jürgens,et al.  Do code clones matter? , 2009, 2009 IEEE 31st International Conference on Software Engineering.

[40]  Ioannis Stamelos,et al.  An empirical investigation of an object-oriented design heuristic for maintainability , 2003, J. Syst. Softw..

[41]  Richard C. Gronback.  Software Remodeling: Improving Design and Implementation Quality , 2003 .

[42]  M. Mäntylä,et al.  Subjective evaluation of software evolvability using code smells: An empirical study , 2006, Empirical Software Engineering.

[43]  Radu Marinescu,et al.  Measurement and Quality in Object-Oriented Design , 2005, ICSM.

[44]  Kurt D. Welker,et al.  Software Maintainability Index Revisited , 2001 .

[45]  Jochen Kreimer,et al.  Adaptive Detection of Design Flaws , 2005, LDTA@ETAPS.

[46]  Radu Marinescu,et al.  Detection strategies: metrics-based rules for detecting design flaws , 2004, 20th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance, 2004. Proceedings..

[47]  Steve Counsell,et al.  Code smells as system-level indicators of maintainability: An empirical study , 2013, J. Syst. Softw..

[48]  R. Weisberg.  A-N-D , 2011 .

[49]  Bente Anda,et al.  Assessing Software System Maintainability using Structural Measures and Expert Assessments , 2007, 2007 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance.

[50]  Zhendong Su,et al.  Context-based detection of clone-related bugs , 2007, ESEC-FSE '07.

[51]  Mei-Hwa Chen,et al.  An empirical study on object-oriented metrics , 1999, Proceedings Sixth International Software Metrics Symposium (Cat. No.PR00403).