A controlled experiment investigation of an object-oriented design heuristic for maintainability

Deligiannis, Ignatios; Stamelos, Ioannis; Angelis, Lefteris; Roumeliotis, Μanos; Shepperd, Martin

doi:10.1016/s0164-1212(03)00240-1

Cited by 49 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…Deligiannis et al conducted an empirical study to analyze the influence of God classes on software understandability and maintainability [27]; their findings support the claim that God classes have a negative impact on the evolution of design structures. Abbes et al [11] investigated the influence of Blob and Spaghetti Code on software understandability.…”

Section: A Antipatternsmentioning

confidence: 81%

A Study on the Relation between Antipatterns and the Cost of Class Unit Testing

Sabané

Penta

Antoniol

et al. 2013

2013 17th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering

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Abstract-Antipatterns are known as recurring, poor design choices; recent and past studies indicated that they negatively affect software systems in terms of understandability and maintainability, also increasing change-and defect-proneness. For this reason, refactoring actions are often suggested. In this paper, we investigate a different side-effect of antipatterns, which is their effect on testability and on testing cost in particular. We consider as (upper bound) indicator of testing cost the number of test cases that satisfy the minimal data member usage matrix (MaDUM) criterion proposed by Bashir and Goel. A study-carried out on four Java programs, Ant 1.8.3, ArgoUML 0.20, CheckStyle 4.0, and JFreeChart 1.0.13-supports the evidence that, on the one hand, antipatterns unit testing requires, on average, a number of test cases substantially higher than unit testing for non-antipattern classes. On the other hand, antipattern classes must be carefully tested because they are more defect-prone than other classes. Finally, we illustrate how specific refactoring actions-applied to classes participating in antipatterns-could reduce testing cost.

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Section: A Antipatternsmentioning

confidence: 81%

A Study on the Relation between Antipatterns and the Cost of Class Unit Testing

Sabané

Penta

Antoniol

et al. 2013

2013 17th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering

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“…The achieved results show that smells do not always constitute a problem, and that often class size impacts maintainability more than the presence of smells. Deligiannis et al (2004) also performed a controlled experiment showing that the presence of God Class smell negatively affects the maintainability of source code. Also, the authors highlight an influence played by these smells in the way developers apply the inheritance mechanism.…”

Section: Code Smells and User Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Such tools exploit different types of approaches, including metrics-based detection (Lanza and Marinescu 2010;Moha et al 2010;Marinescu 2004;Munro 2005), graph-based techniques (Tsantalis and Chatzigeorgiou 2009), mining of code changes (Palomba et al 2015a), textual analysis of source code (Palomba et al 2016b), or search-based optimization techniques (Kessentini et al 2010;Sahin et al 2014). On the other side, researchers investigated how relevant code smells are for developers (Yamashita and Moonen 2013;Palomba et al 2014), when and why they are introduced (Tufano et al 2015), how they evolve over time (Arcoverde et al 2011;Chatzigeorgiou and Manakos 2010;Lozano et al 2007;Ratiu et al 2004;Tufano et al 2017), and whether they impact on software quality properties, such as program comprehensibility (Abbes et al 2011), fault-and change-proneness (Khomh et al 2012;Khomh et al 2009a;D'Ambros et al 2010), and code maintainability Moonen 2012, 2013;Deligiannis et al 2004;Li and Shatnawi 2007;Sjoberg et al 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the diffuseness and the impact on maintainability of code smells: a large scale empirical investigation

et al. 2017

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Code smells are symptoms of poor design and implementation choices that may hinder code comprehensibility and maintainability. Despite the effort devoted by the research community in studying code smells, the extent to which code smells in software systems affect software maintainability remains still unclear. In this paper we present a large scale empirical investigation on the diffuseness of code smells and their impact on code change-and fault-proneness. The study was conducted across a total of 395 releases of 30

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“…Their result showed that classes which are infected with the code smells Shotgun Surgery, God Class or God Methods have a higher class error probability than noninfected classes. Deligiannis et al investigated in the impact of God Classes, based on Riel's definition [18], on the maintainability of object oriented design [3] [4]. In an experiment, he showed that existing design violations in software systems lead to an increased probability that later changes, e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One question that arises is: Am I maintaining the quality of my software as I change or add functionality? Whereas related work in [3], [4] and [9] analyzed the impact and occurrence of code smells by single, static versions of software systems, this paper addresses questions related to the evolution of the code: How do code smells evolve over time and how do code smells influence the change behavior of the infected system elements? One hypothesis is that the bad smells increases over time, because as the software changes are performed, the software degrades.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%