Traditional software metrics have been used to evaluate the maintainability of software programs by supporting the identification of code smells. Recently, concern metrics have also been proposed with this purpose. While traditional metrics quantify properties of software modules, concern metrics quantify concern properties, such as scattering and tangling. Despite being increasingly used in em...

A code smell is a symptom in computer programming that may indicate design flaws or code decay within a software system. As such, much research has been conducted regarding their detection and impact on understandability and changeability of source code. Current methods, however, can not be applied to highly configurable software systems, that is, variable systems that can be configured to fit ...

In the last decade several catalogues have been defined to characterize code bad smells, i.e., symptoms of poor design and implementation choices. On top of such catalogues, researchers have defined methods and tools to automatically detect and/or remove bad smells. Nevertheless, there is an ongoing debate regarding the extent to which developers perceive bad smells as serious design problems. ...

Code smells in traditional software artifacts are common symptoms of the violation of fundamental design principles which negatively impact the quality of the resulting software product. Symptoms of code smells commonly occur in traditional software artifacts and cannot be directly mapped to model-based software artifacts. In this paper, we present a catalog for the detection and handling of mo...

Code smells represent code decay and as such should be eradicated from a system to prevent future maintenance problems. A range of twenty smells described by Fowler and Beck each require varying numbers and combinations of refactorings in order to be eradicated — but exactly how many are needed when we consider related, nested refactorings is unclear. In this paper, we enumerate these refactori...

Identifying bad design patterns in software is a successful and inspiring research trend. While these patterns do not necessarily correspond to software errors, the fact is that they raise potential problematic issues, often referred to as code smells, and that can for example compromise maintainability or evolution. The identification of code smells in spreadsheets, which can be viewed as soft...

Bad smells are usually related to program source code, arising from bad design and programming practices. Refactoring activities are often motivated by the detection of bad smells. With the increasing adoption of Design-by-Contract (DBC) methodologies in formal software development, evidence of bad design practices can similarly be found in programs that combine actual production code with inte...

Object-oriented code smells are well-known concepts in software engineering that refer to bad design and development practices commonly observed systems. With the emergence of mobile apps, new classes have been identified by research community as mobile-specific smells. These presented symptoms important performance issues or bottlenecks. Despite multiple empirical studies about these smells, t...

Many code smell detection techniques and tools have been proposed, mainly aiming to eliminate design flaws improve software quality. Most of them are based on heuristics which rely a set metrics corresponding threshold values. Those suffer from subjectivity issues, discordant results among the tools, reliability thresholds. To mitigate these problems, we used machine learning automate developer...