DECOR: A Method for the Specification and Detection of Code and Design Smells

Abstract-- Code and design smells are poor solutions to recurring implementation and design problems. They may hinder the evolution of a system by making it hard for software engineers to carry out changes. We propose three contributions to the research field related to code and design smells: (1) DECOR, a method that embodies and defines all the steps necessary for the specification and detection of code and design smells; (2) DETEX, a detection technique that instantiates this method; and (3) an empirical validation in terms of precision and recall of DETEX. The originality of DETEX stems from the ability for engineers to specify smells at a high-level of abstraction using a consistent vocabulary and domain-specific language for automatically generating detection algorithms. Using DETEX, we specify four well-known design smells: the antipatterns Blob, Functional Decomposition, Spaghetti Code, and Swiss Army Knife, and their 15 underlying code smells, and we automatically generate the...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: TSE
• Authors: Naouel Moha, Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc, Laurence Duchien, Anne-Françoise Le Meur
• Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Code, Design, Detection, TSE 2010