Enhancing the Detection of Code Anomalies with Architecture-Sensitive Strategies

Abstract

Research has shown that code anomalies may be related to problems in the architecture design. Without proper mechanisms to support the identification of architecturallyrelevant code anomalies, software systems will degrade and might be discontinued as a consequence. Nowadays, metrics-based detection strategy is the most common mechanism to identify code anomalies. However, these strategies often fail to detect architecturally-relevant code anomalies. A key limitation is that they solely exploit measurable static properties of the source code. This paper proposes and evaluates a suite of architecturesensitive detection strategies. These strategies exploit information related to how fully-modularized and widely-scoped architectural concerns are realized by the code elements. The accuracy of the proposed detection strategies is assessed in a sample of nearly 3500 architecturally-relevant code anomalies and 950 architectural problems distributed in 6 software systems. Our findings show that more than the 60% of code anomalies detected by the proposed strategies were related to architectural problems. Additionally, the proposed strategies identified on average 50% more architecturally-relevant code anomalies than those gathered with using conventional strategies.

Bad Smells in Software Product Lines: A Systematic Review

“…Code anomalies are even more critical to a system design when they are related to architectural problems [24]. A code anomaly, C, is considered as hybrid smell when: i) the code elements (e.g., methods or classes) affected by C are in charge of implementing architectural elements (e.g., components and interfaces); and ii) these architectural elements are affected by an architectural problem, P [24].…”

“…The conventional strategy to detect this smell only focuses on measuring the number of attributes that a given method accesses. The architecture-sensitive strategy is a step beyond because it considers different types of accessed code [24]. In [24], each hybrid smell is described, but they are called architecture-sensitive strategies, as these anomalies cannot be classified as code or architectural smells, we understand that a new type of smell is necessary (defined on the next section).…”

Prioritization of Code Anomalies Based on Architecture Sensitiveness

“…Such limitations are the main reasons why the current detection strategies are not able to support the detection of code anomalies responsible for inserting architectural problems [19]. Finally, a recent study [19] investigated to what extent the architecture sensitive detection strategies can better identify code anomalies related to architectural problems [22].…”

Detecting Architectural Violations Using Responsibility and Dependency Constraints of Components

“…By defining rules for the MVC2 and applying the technique to web applications using the Play Framework, we obtained accurate detection results. Compared with existing work on the detection of architectural smells and violations, and recommendations of architecture-adapting refactorings [5], [7], [8], our technique is novel to the best of our knowledge.…”

“…Macia et al proposed a technique to detect code anomalies using architectural concern-based metrics [8], [10]. Although these techniques utilize dependencies to detect violations or anomalies, they do not utilize statementlevel dependencies to infer the roles of code fragments and detect violations on them.…”