Journal ArticleDOI
Quantifying the Effect of Code Smells on Maintenance Effort
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TLDR
To reduce maintenance effort, a focus on reducing code size and the work practices that limit the number of changes may be more beneficial than refactoring code smells.Abstract:
Context: Code smells are assumed to indicate bad design that leads to less maintainable code. However, this assumption has not been investigated in controlled studies with professional software developers. Aim: This paper investigates the relationship between code smells and maintenance effort. Method: Six developers were hired to perform three maintenance tasks each on four functionally equivalent Java systems originally implemented by different companies. Each developer spent three to four weeks. In total, they modified 298 Java files in the four systems. An Eclipse IDE plug-in measured the exact amount of time a developer spent maintaining each file. Regression analysis was used to explain the effort using file properties, including the number of smells. Result: None of the 12 investigated smells was significantly associated with increased effort after we adjusted for file size and the number of changes; Refused Bequest was significantly associated with decreased effort. File size and the number of changes explained almost all of the modeled variation in effort. Conclusion: The effects of the 12 smells on maintenance effort were limited. To reduce maintenance effort, a focus on reducing code size and the work practices that limit the number of changes may be more beneficial than refactoring code smells.read more
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Proceedings ArticleDOI
An Empirical Study on the Occurrences of Code Smells in Open Source and Industrial Projects
TL;DR: All smells do not occur at the same frequency and some smells are very frequent, so the short list of most frequently occurred smells can help developers to write or reuse source code carefully without inducing the smells from the beginning during software development.
Journal ArticleDOI
Recommendation of Move Method Refactoring to Optimize Modularization Using Conceptual Similarity
TL;DR: The results of a preliminary empirical evaluation indicate that the proposed approach provides better results with average precision of 65% and recall of 63% after running it on five well-known open projects than JDeodorant tool (a popular eclipse plugin for refactorings).
Proceedings ArticleDOI
RMove: Recommending Move Method Refactoring Opportunities using Structural and Semantic Representations of Code
TL;DR: RMove as discussed by the authors proposes an approach to recommend Move Method refactoring named RMove by automatically learning structural and semantic representation from code fragment respectively, concatenate these representations together and further train the machine learning classifiers to guide the movement of method to suitable classes.
Journal ArticleDOI
Generation of refactoring algorithms by grammatical evolution
Proceedings ArticleDOI
An Experiment on the Effects of Modularity on Code Modification and Understanding
TL;DR: In this paper , the authors conducted a controlled experiment where 40 students performed a modification task on two different designs, one with higher modularity than the other, and found a trend where understanding was lower for the high modularity design, and that understanding of modularity needs to be better supported when teaching software design.
References
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Book
Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code
TL;DR: Almost every expert in Object-Oriented Development stresses the importance of iterative development, but how do you add function to the existing code base while still preserving its design integrity?
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Journal ArticleDOI
A survey of software refactoring
Tom Mens,Tom Tourwe +1 more
TL;DR: This research is compared and discussed based on a number of different criteria: the refactoring activities that are supported, the specific techniques and formalisms that are used for supporting these activities, the types of software artifacts that are being refactored, the important issues that need to be taken into account when buildingRefactoring tool support, and the effect of refactors on the software process.
Journal ArticleDOI
A Systematic Literature Review on Fault Prediction Performance in Software Engineering
TL;DR: Although there are a set of fault prediction studies in which confidence is possible, more studies are needed that use a reliable methodology and which report their context, methodology, and performance comprehensively.
Journal ArticleDOI
DECOR: A Method for the Specification and Detection of Code and Design Smells
TL;DR: DETEX is proposed, a method that embodies and defines all the steps necessary for the specification and detection of code and design smells, and a detection technique that instantiates this method, and an empirical validation in terms of precision and recall of DETEX.