Software engineers often need to identify in their systems “poor” design choices—design defects—that hinder the development and maintenance, as opportunities of improvements and as a measure of the quality of their systems. However, the detection of design defects is difficult because of the lack of specifications and tools. We propose DECOR, a method to specify design defects systematically an...

Metaphorical effects are commonly assumed to be unidirectional, running from concrete to abstract domains but not vice versa. Noting that metaphorical effects are often found to be bidirectional, we explore how they may be mediated and moderated according to the principles of knowledge accessibility and applicability. Using the example of "something smells fishy" (a metaphorical expression of s...

Metaphorical effects are commonly assumed to be unidirectional, running from concrete to abstract domains but not vice versa. Noting that metaphorical effects are often found to be bidirectional, we explore how they may be mediated and moderated according to the principles of knowledge accessibility and applicability. Using the example of “something smells fishy” (a metaphorical expression of s...

Duplicated or similar source code, also known as code clones, are possible malicious ‘code smells’ that may need to be removed through refactoring to enhance maintainability. Among many potential refactoring opportunities, the choice and order of a set of refactoring activities may have distinguishable effect on the design/code quality measured in terms of software metrics. Moreover, there may ...

When assessing the quality and maintainability of large C++ code bases, tools are needed for extracting several facts from the source code, such as: architecture, structure, code smells, and quality metrics. Moreover, these facts should be presented in such ways so that one can correlate them and find outliers and anomalies. We present SolidFX, an integrated reverse-engineering environment (IRE...

Design patterns are well known solutions to common problems and are extensively utilized in software development. Yet, little empirical work has been conducted to evaluate or validate the consequences that poor design decisions have on pattern realizations. This paper describes a research program to further the understanding of design pattern evolution. Specifically, we focus on design pattern ...

This paper reports an empirical study on refactoring activity in three Java software systems. We investigated some questions on refactoring activity, to confirm or disagree on conclusions that have been drawn from previous empirical studies. Unlike previous empirical studies, our study found that it is not always true that there are more refactoring activities before major project release date ...

This paper focuses on the power of comments to predict fault-prone programs. In general, comments along with executable statements enhance the understandability of programs. However, comments may also be used to mask the lack of readability in the program, therefore well-written comments are referred to as “deodorant to mask code smells” in the field of code refactoring. This paper conducts an ...

Refused bequest is a code smell that originates from introduction of inappropriate class hierarchies where subclasses do not specialize or use the functionalities provided by the parent class. The existing refused bequest code smell identification algorithms use either static analysis or a combination of static and dynamic analysis based technique. However, those algorithms do not consider vers...