On the diffuseness and the impact on maintainability of code smells

On the diffuseness and the impact on maintainability of code smells: A large scale empirical investigation

Palomba, F. (TU Delft Software Engineering)
Bavota, Gabriele (Università della Svizzera Italiana)
Di Penta, Massimiliano (University of Sannio)
Fasano, Fausto (University of Molise)
Oliveto, Rocco (University of Molise)
De Lucia, Andrea (University of Salerno)

2017-08-07

Code smells are symptoms of poor design and implementation choices that may hinder code comprehensibility and maintainability. Despite the effort devoted by the research community in studying code smells, the extent to which code smells in software systems affect software maintainability remains still unclear. In this paper we present a large scale empirical investigation on the diffuseness of code smells and their impact on code change- and fault-proneness. The study was conducted across a total of 395 releases of 30 open source projects and considering 17,350 manually validated instances of 13 different code smell kinds. The results show that smells characterized by long and/or complex code (e.g., Complex Class) are highly diffused, and that smelly classes have a higher change- and fault-proneness than smell-free classes.

Code smells
Empirical studies
Mining software repositories

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:230f66ba-8c64-410e-899a-fcbeb9b8f190

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-017-9535-z

1382-3256

Empirical Software Engineering, 1-34

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2017 F. Palomba, Gabriele Bavota, Massimiliano Di Penta, Fausto Fasano, Rocco Oliveto, Andrea De Lucia