Towards Heuristics for Supporting the Validation of Code Smells

TL;DR

This paper develops a set of heuristics to assist developers in manually validating code smells, addressing the subjectivity and multiple perspectives involved in the detection process.

Contribution

It introduces an empirically derived, optimized set of heuristics to guide manual validation of eight common code smells, based on a study with experienced developers.

Findings

Developers use different perspectives for validation.

A total of 303 arguments were analyzed and coded into heuristics.

An optimized set of validation heuristics was created for eight code smells.

Abstract

The identification of code smells is largely recognized as a subjective task. Consequently, the automated detection tools available are insufficient to deal with the whole subjectivity involved in the task, requiring human validation. However, developers may follow different but complementary perspectives for manually validating the same code smell. Based on this scenario, our research aims at characterizing a comprehensive and optimized set of heuristics for guiding developers to validate the incidence of code smells reported by automated detection tools. For this purpose, we conducted an empirical study with 12 experienced software developers. In this study, we invited developers to individually validate the incidence of code smells in 24 code snippets from open-source Java projects. For each validation, developers should provide arguments for supporting their decisions. The study findings revealed that developers tend to look from different perspectives even when they agree about the incidence of a code smell. After coding the 303 arguments given into heuristics and refining them, we composed an optimized set of validation items for guiding developers on manually validating the incidence of eight types of code smells: data class, god class, speculative generality, middle man, refused bequest, primitive obsession, long parameter list, and feature envy. We are currently planning a survey with specialists for identifying opportunities for evolving the set of validation items proposed.