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
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Building empirical knowledge on the relationship between code smells and design patterns: An exploratory study
TL;DR: The findings indicate that the relationship between smells and design patterns is software dependent, and it is found that the instability metric weakly reflects this idea.
Journal ArticleDOI
Generating Software Product Line Model by Resolving Code Smells in the Products’ Source Code
TL;DR: This paper proposes an approach for building SPL from source code using the bottom-up strategy, and proposes a possible solution using reverse engineering to obtain the feature model of the SPL.
Journal ArticleDOI
EkmEx - an extended framework for labeling an unlabeled fault dataset
Posted Content
Are Architectural Smells Independent from Code Smells? An Empirical Study
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors conducted a case study analyzing the correlations among 19 code smells, six categories of code smells and four architectural smells, and concluded that architectural smells are correlated with code smells only in a very low number of occurrences and therefore cannot be derived from code smells.
Dissertation
Comparación de dos herramientas para refactorización de brain methods
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors consider the problem of duplicación of codigo and metodos excesivamente largos (in terminos de lineas de codigo or cantidad de sentencias).
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.