A New Approach of Visualizing Code Smells

Code smells are indicators of design flaws that may have negative effects on the comprehensibility and maintainability of a software system. Previous studies on software clones have shown that visualization of findings are useful to identify clones suitable for refactorings. However, techniques to visualize code smells in general are rare and, thus, an interesting field of research to bridge the gap between code smell detection and code smell refactoring. This paper presents an approach that is supposed to help in assessing the extent of code smells and in ranking the relevance of refactoring opportunities.