An exploratory study on cooccurrence of design patterns and bad smells using software metrics

A design pattern is a general reusable solution to commonly recurring problems in software projects. Bad smells are symptoms existing in the source code that possibly indicate the presence of a structural problem that requires code refactoring. Although design pattern and bad smells be different concepts, literature has shown that they may be related and cooccur during the evolution of a software system. This paper presents an empirical study that investigates cooccurrences of design patterns and bad smells as well as identifies the main factors that contribute to the emergence of the relationship between them. We carried out a case study with five Java systems to: (1) investigate if the use of design pattern reduces bad smell occurrence, (2) identify cooccurrences of design patterns and bad smells, and (3) identify situations that contribute for the cooccurrence emergence. As the main result, we found that the application of design pattern not necessarily avoid bad smell occurrences. The results also show that some design patterns such as composite, factory method, and singleton, are intrinsically modular and might be useful in creating high-quality systems. However, other design patterns such as adapter-command, proxy, and state-strategy, have presented high cooccurrence frequency with bad smells; therefore, they require attention in their implementation. Finally, via manual inspection in the components with cooccurrence, we found that the identified cooccurrences appeared due to poor planning and inadequate application of design patterns.     

Android应用程序中代码异味共存现象的实证研究

相对于单一类型的代码异味,代码异味共存现象更具危害性。已有实证研究大多聚焦于分析桌面应用程序中代码异味的共存现象,缺少对Android应用程序中代码异味共存现象的研究。为了研究Android应用程序中代码异味的共存现象,并与桌面应用程序中代码异味共存现象进行比较,分别对285个Android应用程序和30个桌面应用程序进行检测,对检测出来的10种异味进行分析。首先,根据检测结果计算受到多种异味影响的类的百分比。然后,使用公式计算代码异味共存的频率,最后,使用Spearman相关系数分析代码异味共存与应用程序规模的关系。结论如下：a）在Android应用程序中受到一种以上代码异味共同干扰的类占有异味的类的总数的31.04%;b）在两个平台的应用程序中,两对代码异味brain class—brain method和god class—brain method共存的频率较高;c）一种异味、两种异味共存、三种异味共存与Android应用程序的规模具有较强的相关性。     

Code smells in pull requests: An exploratory study

The quality of a pull request is the primary factor integrators consider for its acceptance or rejection. Code smells indicate sub-optimal design or implementation choices in the source code that often lead to a fault-prone outcome, threatening the quality of pull requests. This study explores code smells in 21k pull requests from 25 popular Java projects. We find that both accepted (37%) and rejected (44%) pull requests have code smells, affected mainly by god classes and long methods. Besides, we observe that smelly pull requests are more complex and challenging to understand as they have significantly large sizes, long latency times, more discussion and review comments, and are submitted by contributors with less experience. Our results show that features used in previous studies for pull request acceptance prediction could be potentially employed to predict smell in incoming pull requests. We propose a dynamic approach to predict the presence of such code smells in the newly added pull requests. We evaluate our approach on a dataset of 25 Java projects extracted from GitHub. We further conduct a benchmark study to compare the performance of eight machine learning classifiers. Results of the benchmark study show that XGBoost is the best-performing classifier for smell prediction.     

To what extent can maintenance problems be predicted by code smell detection? – An empirical study

ContextCode smells are indicators of poor coding and design choices that can cause problems during software maintenance and evolution.ObjectiveThis study is aimed at a detailed investigation to which extent problems in maintenance projects can be predicted by the detection of currently known code smells.MethodA multiple case study was conducted, in which the problems faced by six developers working on four different Java systems were registered on a daily basis, for a period up to four weeks. Where applicable, the files associated to the problems were registered. Code smells were detected in the pre-maintenance version of the systems, using the tools Borland Together and InCode. In-depth examination of quantitative and qualitative data was conducted to determine if the observed problems could be explained by the detected smells.ResultsFrom the total set of problems, roughly 30% percent were related to files containing code smells. In addition, interaction effects were observed amongst code smells, and between code smells and other code characteristics, and these effects led to severe problems during maintenance. Code smell interactions were observed between collocated smells (i.e., in the same file), and between coupled smells (i.e., spread over multiple files that were coupled).ConclusionsThe role of code smells on the overall system maintainability is relatively minor, thus complementary approaches are needed to achieve more comprehensive assessments of maintainability. Moreover, to improve the explanatory power of code smells, interaction effects amongst collocated smells and coupled smells should be taken into account during analysis.     

Subjective evaluation of software evolvability using code smells: An empirical study

This paper presents the results of an empirical study on the subjective evaluation of code smells that identify poorly evolvable structures in software. We propose use of the term software evolvability to describe the ease of further developing a piece of software and outline the research area based on four different viewpoints. Furthermore, we describe the differences between human evaluations and automatic program analysis based on software evolvability metrics. The empirical component is based on a case study in a Finnish software product company, in which we studied two topics. First, we looked at the effect of the evaluator when subjectively evaluating the existence of smells in code modules. We found that the use of smells for code evaluation purposes can be difficult due to conflicting perceptions of different evaluators. However, the demographics of the evaluators partly explain the variation. Second, we applied selected source code metrics for identifying four smells and compared these results to the subjective evaluations. The metrics based on automatic program analysis and the human-based smell evaluations did not fully correlate. Based upon our results, we suggest that organizations should make decisions regarding software evolvability improvement based on a combination of subjective evaluations and code metrics. Due to the limitations of the study we also recognize the need for conducting more refined studies and experiments in the area of software evolvability.

Investigating the evolution of code smells in object-oriented systems

Software design problems are known and perceived under many different terms, such as code smells, flaws, non-compliance to design principles, violation of heuristics, excessive metric values and anti-patterns, signifying the importance of handling them in the construction and maintenance of software. Once a design problem is identified, it can be removed by applying an appropriate refactoring, improving in most cases several aspects of quality such as maintainability, comprehensibility and reusability. This paper, taking advantage of recent advances and tools in the identification of non-trivial code smells, explores the presence and evolution of such problems by analyzing past versions of code. Several interesting questions can be investigated such as whether the number of problems increases with the passage of software generations, whether problems vanish by time or only by targeted human intervention, whether code smells occur in the course of evolution of a module or exist right from the beginning and whether refactorings targeting at smell removal are frequent. In contrast to previous studies that investigate the application of refactorings in the history of a software project, we attempt to analyze the evolution from the point of view of the problems themselves. To this end, we classify smell evolution patterns distinguishing deliberate maintenance activities from the removal of design problems as a side effect of software evolution. Results are discussed for two open-source systems and four code smells.     

代码坏味对软件演化影响的实证研究

代码坏味是指程序设计中存在的不良设计模式或设计缺陷.坏味的存在,被认为会阻碍软件的演化与维护.近年来,研究人员致力于探究坏味产生的影响以及坏味与软件演化之间的关系.已有研究表明,代码坏味会随着软件的演化而不断发生变化.通常,软件的演化将涉及源文件的增加、修改与删除这3类具体操作,了解代码坏味与软件演化中源文件操作的关系,将有助于开发者更好地计划软件开发过程和重构软件代码.因此,针对13种常见的坏味,在8个Java项目共计104个版本中进行了系统的实证研究.研究发现,随着软件版本的演化,含代码坏味的文件在整个项目中的占比在不同的项目中呈现出不同的特征.另外,包含代码坏味的文件更倾向于被修改,而坏味本身与文件的添加或者删除并没有太大的关联.更进一步地,在探究的所有坏味中,有几种特定的坏味对文件的修改产生了显著的影响,且这些坏味文件间存在着明显的重叠.这些发现有助于开发人员更好地了解代码坏味,以便于更好地对软件进行维护.     

Code smells as system-level indicators of maintainability: An empirical study

Context

Code smells are manifestations of design flaws that can degrade code maintainability. So far, no research has investigated if these indicators are useful for conducting system-level maintainability evaluations.

Aim

The research in this paper investigates the potential of code smells to reflect system-level indicators of maintainability.

Method

We evaluated four medium-sized Java systems using code smells and compared the results against previous evaluations on the same systems based on expert judgment and the Chidamber and Kemerer suite of metrics. The systems were maintained over a period of up to 4 weeks. During maintenance, effort (person-hours) and number of defects were measured to validate the different evaluation approaches.

Results

Most code smells are strongly influenced by size; consequently code smells are not good indicators for comparing the maintainability of systems differing greatly in size. Also, from the comparison of the different evaluation approaches, expert judgment was found as the most accurate and flexible since it considered effects due to the system's size and complexity and could adapt to different maintenance scenarios.

Conclusion

Code smell approaches show promise as indicators of the need for maintenance in a way that other purely metric-based approaches lack.     

基于排序损失的ECC多标签代码异味检测方法

代码异味是由糟糕的代码或设计问题引起的一种软件特征,严重影响了软件系统的可靠性和可维护性.在软件系统中,一段代码元素可能同时受到多种代码异味的影响,使得软件质量明显下降.多标签分类适用该情况,将高共现的多个代码异味置于同一标签组,可以更好地考虑代码异味的相关性,但现有的多标签代码异味检测方法未考虑同一段代码元素中多种代码异味检测顺序的影响.对此,提出了一种基于排序损失的集成分类器链(ensemble of classifier chains,ECC)多标签代码异味检测方法,该方法选择随机森林作为基础分类器并采取多次迭代ECC的方式,以排序损失最小化为目标,选择一个较优的标签序列集,优化代码异味检测顺序问题,模拟其生成机理,检测一段代码元素是否同时存在长方法长参数列表、复杂类消息链或消息链过大类这3组代码异味.实验采用9个评价指标,结果表明所提出的检测方法优于现有的多标签代码异味检测方法,F1平均值达97.16%.     

How changes affect software entropy: an empirical study

Context Software systems continuously change for various reasons, such as adding new features, fixing bugs, or refactoring. Changes may either increase the source code complexity and disorganization, or help to reducing it. Aim This paper empirically investigates the relationship of source code complexity and disorganization—measured using source code change entropy—with four factors, namely the presence of refactoring activities, the number of developers working on a source code file, the participation of classes in design patterns, and the different kinds of changes occurring on the system, classified in terms of their topics extracted from commit notes. Method We carried out an exploratory study on an interval of the life-time span of four open source systems, namely ArgoUML, Eclipse-JDT, Mozilla, and Samba, with the aim of analyzing the relationship between the source code change entropy and four factors: refactoring activities, number of contributors for a file, participation of classes in design patterns, and change topics. Results The study shows that (i) the change entropy decreases after refactoring, (ii) files changed by a higher number of developers tend to exhibit a higher change entropy than others, (iii) classes participating in certain design patterns exhibit a higher change entropy than others, and (iv) changes related to different topics exhibit different change entropy, for example bug fixings exhibit a limited change entropy while changes introducing new features exhibit a high change entropy. Conclusions Results provided in this paper indicate that the nature of changes (in particular changes related to refactorings), the software design, and the number of active developers are factors related to change entropy. Our findings contribute to understand the software aging phenomenon and are preliminary to identifying better ways to contrast it.     

A systematic literature review on the detection of smells and their evolution in object-oriented and service-oriented systems

This systematic literature review paper investigates the key techniques employed to identify smells in different paradigms of software engineering from object-oriented (OO) to service-oriented (SO). In this review, we want to identify commonalities and differences in the identification of smells in OO and SO systems. Our research method relies on an automatic search from the relevant digital libraries to find the studies published since January 2000 on smells until December 2017. We have conducted a pilot and author-based search that allows us to select the 78 most relevant studies after applying inclusion and exclusion criteria. We evaluated the studies based on the smell detection techniques and the evolution of different methodologies in OO and SO. Among the 78 relevant studies selected, we have identified six different studies in which linguistic source code analysis received less attention from the researchers as compared to the static source code analysis. Smells like the yo-yo problem, unnamed coupling, intensive coupling, and interface bloat received considerably less attention in the literature. We also identified a catalog of 30 smells infrequently reported for SO systems and that require further attention. Moreover, a suite of 20 smells reported for SO systems can also be detected using static source code metrics in OO. Finally, our review highlighted three major research trends that are further subdivided into 20 research patterns initiating the detection of smells toward their correction.     

利用主轴因子法的严重性代码异味相关性分析

代码异味的存在对源代码的可理解性和可维护性有着糟糕的负面影响.通常情况下,研究人员更多是考虑单一代码异味对源代码的影响,但有研究指出,多种代码异味的共同存在以及它们之间的交互往往比单一代码异味有着更严重的负面影响.本文针对主成分分析在布尔类型变量分析中容易产生难以解释的主成分的弊端,提出了一种基于主轴因子法及异味严重性的代码异味相关性分析方法,并在92个系统上对14种代码异味进行试验,从中提取了6个因子,在相关矩阵中新发现了{Extensive Coupling、Long Parameter List}代码异味对的存在.最后本文比较分析了具有严重性标签的代码异味数据集的优势,解释了每个因子的含义并进行分类命名.     

基于预训练模型和多层次信息的代码坏味检测方法

目前已有的代码坏味检测方法仅依赖于代码结构信息和启发式规则, 对嵌入在不同层次代码中的语义信息关注不够, 而且现有的代码坏味检测方法准确率还有进一步提升的空间. 针对该问题, 提出一种基于预训练模型和多层次信息的代码坏味检测方法DeepSmell, 首先采用静态分析工具提取程序中的代码坏味实例和多层次代码度量信息, 并...     

Assessing the capability of code smells to explain maintenance problems: an empirical study combining quantitative and qualitative data

Code smells are indicators of deeper design problems that may cause difficulties in the evolution of a software system. This paper investigates the capability of twelve code smells to reflect actual maintenance problems. Four medium-sized systems with equivalent functionality but dissimilar design were examined for code smells. Three change requests were implemented on the systems by six software developers, each of them working for up to four weeks. During that period, we recorded problems faced by developers and the associated Java files on a daily basis. We developed a binary logistic regression model, with “problematic file” as the dependent variable. Twelve code smells, file size, and churn constituted the independent variables. We found that violation of the Interface Segregation Principle (a.k.a. ISP violation) displayed the strongest connection with maintenance problems. Analysis of the nature of the problems, as reported by the developers in daily interviews and think-aloud sessions, strengthened our view about the relevance of this code smell. We observed, for example, that severe instances of problems relating to change propagation were associated with ISP violation. Based on our results, we recommend that code with ISP violation should be considered potentially problematic and be prioritized for refactoring.     

Comparing and experimenting machine learning techniques for code smell detection

Several code smell detection tools have been developed providing different results, because smells can be subjectively interpreted, and hence detected, in different ways. In this paper, we perform the largest experiment of applying machine learning algorithms to code smells to the best of our knowledge. We experiment 16 different machine-learning algorithms on four code smells (Data Class, Large Class, Feature Envy, Long Method) and 74 software systems, with 1986 manually validated code smell samples. We found that all algorithms achieved high performances in the cross-validation data set, yet the highest performances were obtained by J48 and Random Forest, while the worst performance were achieved by support vector machines. However, the lower prevalence of code smells, i.e., imbalanced data, in the entire data set caused varying performances that need to be addressed in the future studies. We conclude that the application of machine learning to the detection of these code smells can provide high accuracy (>96 %), and only a hundred training examples are needed to reach at least 95 % accuracy.     

An approach to prioritize code smells for refactoring

Code smells are a popular mechanism to find structural design problems in software systems. Consequently, several tools have emerged to support the detection of code smells. However, the number of smells returned by current tools usually exceeds the amount of problems that the developer can deal with, particularly when the effort available for performing refactorings is limited. Moreover, not all the code smells are equally relevant to the goals of the system or its health. This article presents a semi-automated approach that helps developers focus on the most critical problems of the system. We have developed a tool that suggests a ranking of code smells, based on a combination of three criteria, namely: past component modifications, important modifiability scenarios for the system, and relevance of the kind of smell. These criteria are complementary and enable our approach to assess the smells from different perspectives. Our approach has been evaluated in two case-studies, and the results show that the suggested code smells are useful to developers.     

代码坏味研究综述

代码坏味(code smells)是低质量的急需重构的代码片段.代码坏味是软件工程领域的一个研究热点,并且相关研究方向众多、时间跨度大、研究成果丰富.为梳理相关研究思路和研究成果、分析研究热点并预判未来研究方向,对1990年至2020年6月间发表的代码坏味相关的339篇论文进行了系统地分析和归类,对代码坏味的发展趋势进行了分析与统计,量化揭示了相关研究的主流与热点.揭示了学术界关注的关键代码坏味,并研究了工业界与学术界的关注点的差异及其影响.     

基于深度学习的耦合度相关代码坏味检测方法

基于启发式和机器学习的代码坏味检测方法已被证明具有一定的局限性,且现有的检测方法大多集中在较为常见的代码坏味上。针对这些问题,提出了一种深度学习方法来检测过紧的耦合、分散的耦合和散弹式修改这三种与耦合度相关检测较为少见的代码坏味。首先,提取三种代码坏味需要的度量并对得到的数据进行处理;之后,构建卷积神经网络（CNN）与注意力（Attention）机制相结合的深度学习模型,引入的注意力机制可以对输入的度量特征进行权重的分配。从21个开源项目中提取数据集,在10个开源项目中对检测方法进行了验证,并与CNN模型进行对比。实验结果表明：过紧的耦合和分散的耦合在所提模型中取得了更好的结果,相应代码坏味的查准率分别达到了93.61%和99.76%;而散弹式修改在CNN模型中有更好的结果,相应代码坏味查准率达到了98.59%。     

Predicting Code Smells and Analysis of Predictions: Using Machine Learning Techniques and Software Metrics

Code smell detection is essential to improve software quality, enhancing software maintainability, and decrease the risk of faults and failures in the software system. In this paper, we proposed a code smell prediction approach based on machine learning techniques and software metrics. The local interpretable model-agnostic explanations (LIME) algorithm was further used to explain the machine learning model’s predictions and interpretability. The datasets obtained from Fontana et al. were reformed and used to build binary-label and multi-label datasets. The results of 10-fold cross-validation show that the performance of tree-based algorithms (mainly Random Forest) is higher compared with kernel-based and network-based algorithms. The genetic algorithm based feature selection methods enhance the accuracy of these machine learning algorithms by selecting the most relevant features in each dataset. Moreover, the parameter optimization techniques based on the grid search algorithm significantly enhance the accuracy of all these algorithms. Finally, machine learning techniques have high potential in predicting the code smells, which contribute to detect these smells and enhance the software’s quality.

     

类间结构型代码味道自动检测的研究

软件重构是改造软件遗留系统、软件重用的重要手段。代码味道用于描述软件设计缺陷,检测代码味道是软件重构的重要步骤。按照代码味道的特征给代码味道分类,对引发重构的主要缺陷――类之间结构型代码味道,给出了自动化检测的原理,设计和实现了一个检测工具。