Title
Building empirical support for automated code smell detection
Abstract
Identifying refactoring opportunities in software systems is an important activity in today's agile development environments. The concept of code smells has been proposed to characterize different types of design shortcomings in code. Additionally, metric-based detection algorithms claim to identify the "smelly" components automatically. This paper presents results for an empirical study performed in a commercial environment. The study investigates the way professional software developers detect god class code smells, then compares these results to automatic classification. The results show that, even though the subjects perceive detecting god classes as an easy task, the agreement for the classification is low. Misplaced methods are a strong driver for letting subjects identify god classes as such. Earlier proposed metric-based detection approaches performed well compared to the human classification. These results lead to the conclusion that an automated metric-based pre-selection decreases the effort spent on manual code inspections. Automatic detection accompanied by a manual review increases the overall confidence in the results of metric-based classifiers.
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1145/1852786.1852797
ESEM
Keywords
Field
DocType
metric-based classifier,metric-based detection algorithm,god class code,automated metric-based pre-selection,automatic detection,human classification,god class,empirical support,proposed metric-based detection,automated code smell detection,manual code inspection,automatic classification,agile development,code smells,software development,software systems,maintainability,code inspection,empirical study
Data mining,Computer science,Software system,Agile software development,Software,Software inspection,God object,Code refactoring,Code smell,Empirical research
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
39
1.89
17
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jan Schumacher1391.89
Nico Zazworka265730.15
Forrest Shull32231148.90
Carolyn Seaman41628110.06
Michele Shaw5753.45