Do bad smells indicate "trouble" in code?

In 1999 Fowler et al. identified 22 Bad Smells in code to direct the effective refactoring. These are increasingly being used by software engineers. However, the empirical basis of using Bad Smells to direct refactoring and to address 'trouble' in code is not clear. Our project aims to empirically investigate the impact of Bad Smells on software in terms of their relationship to faults.

[1]  Harald C. Gall,et al.  Populating a Release History Database from version control and bug tracking systems , 2003, International Conference on Software Maintenance, 2003. ICSM 2003. Proceedings..

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

[3]  Shari Lawrence Pfleeger.  What Software Engineering Can Learn from Soccer , 2002, IEEE Softw..

[4]  A. Zeller,et al.  Predicting Defects for Eclipse , 2007, Third International Workshop on Predictor Models in Software Engineering (PROMISE'07: ICSE Workshops 2007).

[5]  Shari Lawrence Pfleeger,et al.  Software metrics (2nd ed.): a rigorous and practical approach , 1997 .

[6]  Tom Mens,et al.  A survey of software refactoring , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[7]  Barbara Kitchenham,et al.  Procedures for Performing Systematic Reviews , 2004 .

[8]  Pearl Brereton,et al.  Conducting a systematic literature review from the perspective of a Ph. D. student , 2006 .

[9]  Emilia Mendes,et al.  Trends in Java code changes: the key to identification of refactorings? , 2003, PPPJ.

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

[11]  Shari Lawrence Pfleeger,et al.  Software Metrics : A Rigorous and Practical Approach , 1998 .

[12]  Austen Rainer,et al.  Validating a requirements process improvement model , 2003 .