Paper Info
Title
Do developers care about code smells? An exploratory survey
Abstract
Code smells are a well-known metaphor to describe symptoms of code decay or other issues with code quality which can lead to a variety of maintenance problems. Even though code smell detection and removal has been well-researched over the last decade, it remains open to debate whether or not code smells should be considered meaningful conceptualizations of code quality issues from the developer's perspective. To some extent, this question applies as well to the results provided by current code smell detection tools. Are code smells really important for developers? If they are not, is this due to the lack of relevance of the underlying concepts, due to the lack of awareness about code smells on the developers' side, or due to the lack of appropriate tools for code smell analysis or removal? In order to align and direct research efforts to address actual needs and problems of professional developers, we need to better understand the knowledge about, and interest in code smells, together with their perceived criticality. This paper reports on the results obtained from an exploratory survey involving 85 professional software developers.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1109/WCRE.2013.6671299
Reverse Engineering
Keywords
Field
DocType
program diagnostics,software maintenance,software quality,code decay,code quality,code smell detection,code smell removal,software maintenance problems,code analysis tools,code smell detection,code smells,maintainability,refactoring,survey,usability
Systems engineering,Computer science,Usability,Software maintenance,Software quality,Code refactoring,Maintainability,Metaphor,Code smell,Code review
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1095-1350
62
1.43
References 
Authors
20
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Aiko Fallas Yamashita1804.29
Leon Moonen2143272.21