Code Smell Research:

History and Future Directions

Nikolaos Tsantalis
Computer Science & Software Engineering

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Changes aiming to improve the future

maintainability and reliability of the
software system.

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 Refactoring Object-oriented Frameworks,

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Introduced the concept of refactorings as behaviorpreserving program restructuring operations.
Introduced the concept of preconditions as
conditions that should be examined to determine
whether a refactoring can be applied safely.

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Duplicated Code:
If you see the same code
structure in more than one
place, find a way to unify
them.

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http://www.industriallogic.com/blog/smells-to-refactorings-cheatsheet/

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Code smell definition for Inappropriate Interface

inappropriateInterface(?class,?interface,?subclasses) :findall(<?itf,?scs>,
commonSubclassInterface(?class,?itf,?scs),
?result),
removeDuplicates(?result,?nodups),
member(<?interface,?subclasses>,?nodups)
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 Treat the improvement of object-oriented design

as a search problem in the space of

alternative designs
The move in the search space is achieved by
modeling refactorings (inheritance-related)
Apply search algorithms using QMOOD as the
fitness function (rank alternative designs)
The outcome is a sequence of refactorings
leading to the optimal design
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Many code smell definitions are based on

historical change information
Shotgun Surgery: When every time you make a
kind of change, you have to make a lot of little
changes to a lot of different classes.
Parallel Inheritance Hierarchies: When every time
you make a subclass of one class, you also have to
make a subclass of another.

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 12 code smells
6 Professional developers were hired to
implement change requests
4 medium-sized Java systems with known
code smells
4 weeks of development
Daily interviews and think-aloud sessions

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Advantages:
Feasible and behavior preserving solutions
to design problems

Ranking and prioritizing solutions based on

their expected effect on design quality
A holistic approach for preventive
maintenance
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1. Identify places where software should be refactored

(known as bad smells).
2. Determine which refactoring(s) should be applied to the
identified places.
3. Guarantee that the applied refactoring preserves
behavior.
4. Apply the refactoring.
5. Assess the effect of the refactoring on quality
characteristics of the software.
6. Maintain the consistency between the refactored code
and other software artifacts.
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 The entity set of an attribute attr {the methods

accessing attr}
The entity set of a method m {the attributes and
methods accessed by m}
The entity set of a class C {the attributes and
methods that belong to C}

, = 1

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,

,

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cohesion

coupling

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Context

State
state

- state
int
type ::int
- STATE_A : int = 1
- STATE_B : int = 2
+ method() {
state.method();
if state == STATE_A
} doStateA();
else
if state == STATE_B
doStateB();
}

+method()

StateA

StateB

+method() {

+method() {

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For every variable declared in a method:

1. Find the statements that update its value or state
2. Compute the slices starting from these statements
3. The union of the computed slices contains the
complete computation of the variable
4. Find whether some statements in the union of slices
have to be duplicated after extraction
5. Examine whether the duplication of statements
preserves the program behavior

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Since the beginning of 2011

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 Debt is the effect of incomplete, immature,

or inadequate maintenance activities
Delayed tasks may bring a short-term benefit
(higher productivity, shorter release time)
Might have to be paid back in the future with
Interest (increased effort)
Principal is the effort to pay off the debt
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Tracking clones as project evolves

Verifying the consistent modification of clones
Updating clones and groups as project evolves
Assessing the harmfulness of clones

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 So far, we used
Static source code analysis
Semantic analysis
Change history analysis

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Every code smell involves a certain risk

for future maintainability

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 Likelihood of occurrence of the risky event

Exposure of the system to the event
Consequence of the event

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 Risky events changes driven by code smells

Ex. 1: Fixing the same bug in a clone group
Ex. 2: Making a method more envy to another class

Intuition: code that changes frequently due to

a design flaw imposes a high risk to the
maintainability of a system

Likelihood proneness to code smell driven

changes (estimated from the history of changes)
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 Intuition: the more extensively a module is used,

the more extensive the propagation of code
smell driven changes to dependent modules

Exposure the number and strength of

incoming dependencies (estimated from static
and dynamic analysis)

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 Consequence cost of code smell driven

changes (effort, time, money).
From the opposite perspective:

Consequence effect of removing the code

smell.
Estimated by computing the impact of the
corresponding refactoring on metrics.
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Given a set of different types of refactoring

opportunities in a software system

Conflicts
Dependencies
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Visit our project at

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