An Exploratory Study of the Impact of Code Smells on Software Change-proneness

—Code smells are poor implementation choices, thought to make object-oriented systems hard to maintain. In this study, we investigate if classes with code smells are more change-prone than classes without smells. Specifically, we test the general hypothesis: classes with code smells are not more change prone than other classes. We detect 29 code smells in 9 releases of Azureus and in 13 releases of Eclipse, and study the relation between classes with these code smells and class change-proneness. We show that, in almost all releases of Azureus and Eclipse, classes with code smells are more change-prone than others, and that specific smells are more correlated than others to change-proneness. These results justify a posteriori previous work on the specification and detection of code smells and could help focusing quality assurance and testing activities. Keywords—Code Smells, Mining Software Repositories, Empirical Software Engineering. I. CONTEXT AND PROBLEM In theory, code smell...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: WCRE
• Authors: Foutse Khomh, Massimiliano Di Penta, Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc
• Keywords: Code Smells, Design Patterns, Reverse Engineering, Specific Smells, WCRE 2009