A Taxonomy and an Initial Empirical Study of Bad Smells in Code

This paper presents research in progress, as well as tentative findings related to the empirical study of so called bad code smells. We present a taxonomy that categorizes similar bad smells. We believe the taxonomy makes the smells more understandable and recognizes the relationships between smells. Additionally, we present our initial findings from an empirical study of the use of the smells for evaluating code quality in a small Finnish software product company. Our findings indicate that the taxonomy for the smells could help explain the identified correlations between the subjective evaluations of the existence of the smells.