Refactoring large systems involves several sources of uncertainty related to the severity levels of code smells to be corrected and the importance of the classes in which the smells are located. Due to the dynamic nature of software development, these values cannot be accurately determined in practice, leading to refactoring sequences that lack robustness. To address this problem, we introduced...

The Software Product Line (SPL) paradigm has proven to be an effective way to achieve large scale reuse in different domains. It takes advantage of common aspects between different products, while also considering product specific features. The architecture plays an important role in SPL engineering, by providing means to better understand and maintain the product-derivation environment. Howeve...

The number of end-users who write spreadsheet programs is at least an order of magnitude larger than the number of trained programmers who write professional software. We studied a corpus of 3691 spreadsheets and we found that their formulas are riddled with the same smells that plague professional software: hardcoded constants, duplicated expressions, unnecessary complexity, and unsanitized in...

Software quality is an important issue in the development of software systems. The extent to which the software possesses a desired set of quality attributes such as testability, performance, maintainability, and manageability indicates the success of the design and the overall quality of the software system. These attributes are adversely affected by antipatterns. These design smells, the symp...

Code comments are the primary means to document implementation and facilitate program comprehension. Thus, their quality should be a concern improve maintenance. While much effort has been dedicated detecting bad smells, such as clones in code, little work focused on comments. In this paper we present our solution detect that developers fix. RepliComment can automatically analyze Java projects ...

This paper defines algorithms to automatically detect five types of bad smells that occur in aspect-oriented systems, more specifically those written using the AspectJ language. We provide a prototype implementation to evaluate the detection algorithms in a case study, where bad smells are detected in three well-known AspectJ systems.

Aspect-oriented programming strives to encapsulate crosscutting concerns into modular units called aspects. Aspect Mining techniques aim to search for aspect candidates in existing software systems. These techniques associate all occurrences of scattered code in existing applications with the absence of aspects. In this paper, we demonstrate that in a poorly designed object-oriented system, sca...

Abstract Test smells aim to capture design issues in test code that reduces its maintainability. These have been extensively studied and generally found quite prevalent both human-written automatically generated test-cases. However, most evidence of prevalence is based on specific static detection rules. Although those are the original, conceptual definitions various smells, recent empirical st...