Identifying Code Smells with Multiple Concern Views

Abstract

Code smells are anomalies often caused by the way concerns are realized in the source code. Their identification might depend on properties governing the structure of individual concerns and their inter-dependencies in the system implementation. Although code visualization tools are increasingly applied to support anomaly detection, they are mostly limited to represent modular structures, such as methods, classes and packages. This paper presents a multiple views approach that enriches four categories of code views with concern properties, namely: (i) concern's package-classmethod structure, (ii) concern's inheritance-wise structure, (iii) concern dependency, and (iv) concern dependency weight. An exploratory study was conducted to assess the extent to which visual views support code smell detection. Developers identified a set of well-known code smells on five versions of an opensource system. Two important results came out of this study. First, the concern-driven views provided useful support to identify God Class and Divergent Change smells. Second, strategies for smell detection supported by the multiple concern views were uncovered.

Investigating factors that affect the human perception on god class detection: an analysis based on a family of four controlled experiments

“…In this direction, software visualization has emerged as an alternative to address smell detection (Simon et al 2001;Parnin et al 2008;Murphy-Hill and Black 2010;Carneiro et al 2010). Software visualization employs visual paradigms (visual resources, graphic design or animation) to facilitate both the human understanding and effective use of software (Price et al 1998).…”

“…Their main findings were: i) programmers identify more smells using the tool than not using the tool; ii) smells are subjective; and iii) the tool helps in deciding what is and what is not a code smell. Carneiro et al (2010) presented the SourceMiner tool, a multi-perspective visualization environment implemented as an Eclipse plug-in. SourceMiner has visualizations addressing software characteristics such as inheritance and coupling.…”

“…SourceMiner enhances the comprehension of relevant software attributes on god class detection, in comparison with the traditional Eclipse IDE setup (Carneiro et al 2010;Mendonça 2013, 2014). We detach the observation of size and coupling relations among software classes.…”

Prioritizing the refactoring need for critical component using combined approach

“…When anti-pattern occurs in a software system, it is detected by the code smells (Rahman et al, 2012). Code smell is not Antipattern at the deign level, but it can be at the programming level (Carneiro et al, 2010). Certain code smells like duplicate code; parallel inheritance occurs due to poor programming practices, not because of lack of design in the software system (Moha et al, 2010;Van Emden & Moonen, 2002).…”

Synthesis of Code Anomalies: Revealing Design Problems in the Source Code

“…Besides showing classes and methods of the system, this map also shows results from conventional anomaly detection strategies. The work of Carneiro et al (Carneiro et al 2010) presents a multi-view approach that enriches four categories of source code views in order to support the visualization of stakeholders' concerns. The enriched views enable programmers to visualize how certain high-level concerns (e.g., persistence, error handling, caching, security and the like) are realized in the program elements.…”