research-article

On the Prioritization of Design-Relevant Smelly Elements: A Mixed-Method, Multi-Project Study

Authors:

Anderson Oliveira,

Leonardo Sousa,

Willian Oizumi,

Alessandro GarciaAuthors Info & Claims

SBCARS '19: Proceedings of the XIII Brazilian Symposium on Software Components, Architectures, and Reuse

Pages 83 - 92

https://doi.org/10.1145/3357141.3357142

Published: 23 September 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Software systems are likely to face what is called design problems. Given the typical lack of design documentation, developers have to rely on implementation-level symptoms, the so-called code smells, to identify and remove design problems. A code smell is a microstructure in the program that can indicate the presence of a design problem. Large programs have hundreds or thousands of program elements (e.g., classes) in which a significant proportion may be affected by smells. Consequently, due to time constraints and the large number of elements, developers have to prioritize the designrelevant program elements, i.e., locate a shortlist of elements that are suspects of having design-relevant smells. However, this task is hard and time-consuming. Unfortunately, the literature fails to provide developers with effective heuristics that automate such prioritization task. The objective of this paper is to propose heuristics that effectively locate a shortlist of design-relevant smelly program elements. For this purpose, we report two studies. In the first one, we investigated the criteria that developers used in practice to accurately prioritize design-relevant smelly elements. Based on these criteria, we derived a preliminary suite of prioritization heuristics. Since we do not know if the heuristics are suitable for an effective prioritization across multiple projects, we performed a second study to evaluate the proposed heuristics. We found that two out of nine heuristics reached an average precision higher than 75% for the four projects we analyzed. Thus, our findings suggest these heuristics are promising to support developers in prioritizing design-relevant smelly elements.

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Cited By

Masudur Rahman MSatter AMahbubul Alam Joarder MSakib K(2025)Software Metric Based Impact Analysis of Code Smells ‐ A Large Scale Empirical StudySoftware: Practice and Experience10.1002/spe.3405Online publication date: 13-Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.3405
Liu LLin GZhu LYang ZSong PWang XHu W(2024)Revisiting Code Smell Severity Prioritization using learning to rank techniquesExpert Systems with Applications10.1016/j.eswa.2024.123483249(123483)Online publication date: Sep-2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2024.123483
Verma RKumar KVerma H(2024)Prioritizing God Class Code Smells in Object-Oriented Software Using Fuzzy Inference SystemArabian Journal for Science and Engineering10.1007/s13369-024-08826-949:9(12743-12770)Online publication date: 5-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s13369-024-08826-9
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

On the Prioritization of Design-Relevant Smelly Elements: A Mixed-Method, Multi-Project Study
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Designing software
      1. Software design engineering

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SBCARS '19: Proceedings of the XIII Brazilian Symposium on Software Components, Architectures, and Reuse

September 2019

145 pages

ISBN:9781450376372

DOI:10.1145/3357141

Copyright © 2019 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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SBC: Sociedade Brasileira de Computação

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New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 23 September 2019

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SBCARS '19

SBCARS '19: XIII Brazilian Symposium on Software Components, Architectures, and Reuse

September 23 - 27, 2019

Salvador, Brazil

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Overall Acceptance Rate 23 of 79 submissions, 29%

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Cited By

Masudur Rahman MSatter AMahbubul Alam Joarder MSakib K(2025)Software Metric Based Impact Analysis of Code Smells ‐ A Large Scale Empirical StudySoftware: Practice and Experience10.1002/spe.3405Online publication date: 13-Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.3405
Liu LLin GZhu LYang ZSong PWang XHu W(2024)Revisiting Code Smell Severity Prioritization using learning to rank techniquesExpert Systems with Applications10.1016/j.eswa.2024.123483249(123483)Online publication date: Sep-2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2024.123483
Verma RKumar KVerma H(2024)Prioritizing God Class Code Smells in Object-Oriented Software Using Fuzzy Inference SystemArabian Journal for Science and Engineering10.1007/s13369-024-08826-949:9(12743-12770)Online publication date: 5-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s13369-024-08826-9
Oliveira ACorreia JSousa LAssunção WCoutinho DGarcia AOizumi WBarbosa CUchôa APereira J(2023)Don’t Forget the Exception! : Considering Robustness Changes to Identify Design Problems2023 IEEE/ACM 20th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)10.1109/MSR59073.2023.00064(417-429)Online publication date: May-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/MSR59073.2023.00064
Verma RKumar KVerma H(2023)Code smell prioritization in object‐oriented software systemsJournal of Software: Evolution and Process10.1002/smr.253635:12Online publication date: 29-Jan-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1002/smr.2536
Sousa LOizumi WGarcia AOliveira ACedrim DLucena C(2020)When Are Smells Indicators of Architectural Refactoring OpportunitiesProceedings of the 28th International Conference on Program Comprehension10.1145/3387904.3389276(354-365)Online publication date: 13-Jul-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3387904.3389276
Uchoa ABarbosa COizumi WBlenilio PLima RGarcia ABezerra C(2020)How Does Modern Code Review Impact Software Design Degradation? An In-depth Empirical Study2020 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)10.1109/ICSME46990.2020.00055(511-522)Online publication date: Sep-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME46990.2020.00055

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