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

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 sti...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Empirical software engineering : an international journal Vol. 23; no. 3; pp. 1188 - 1221
Main Authors: Palomba, Fabio, Bavota, Gabriele, Penta, Massimiliano Di, Fasano, Fausto, Oliveto, Rocco, Lucia, Andrea De
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: New York Springer US 01.06.2018
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects:
Compilers
Computer Science
Freeware
Interpreters
Maintainability
Programming Languages
Software Engineering/Programming and Operating Systems
Source code
Empirical studies
Code smells
Mining software repositories
ISSN:1382-3256, 1573-7616
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary: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.
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ISSN:1382-3256
1573-7616
DOI:10.1007/s10664-017-9535-z