Exploring the eradication of code smells: An empirical and theoretical perspective

This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund - Copyright @ 2010 Hindawi Publishing CorporationCode smells reflect code decay, and, as such, developers should seek to eradicate such smells through application of “deodorant” in the form of one or more refactorings. However, a relative lack of studies exploring code smells either theoretically or empirically when compared with literature on refactoring suggests that there are reasons why smell eradication is neither being applied in anger, nor the subject of significant research. In this paper, we present three studies as supporting evidence for this stance. The first is an analysis of a set of five, open-source Java systems in which we show very little tendency for smells to be eradicated by developers; the second is an empirical study of a subsystem of a proprietary, C# web-based application where practical problems arise in smell identification and the third, a theoretical enumeration of smell-related refactorings to suggest why smells may be left alone from an effort perspective. Key findings of the study were that first, smells requiring application of simple refactorings were eradicated in favour of smells requiring more complex refactorings; second, a wide range of conflicts and anomalies soon emerged when trying to identify smelly code; an interesting result with respect to comment lines was also observed. Finally, perceived (estimated) effort to eradicate a smell may be a key factor in explaining why smell eradication is avoided by developers. The study thus highlights the need for a clearer research strategy on the issue of code smells and all aspects of their identification and measurement.The research in this paper was supported by a grant from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) (Grant no: EP/G031126/1

Smelly Maps: The Digital Life of Urban Smellscapes

Smell has a huge influence over how we perceive places. Despite its importance, smell has been crucially overlooked by urban planners and scientists alike, not least because it is difficult to record and analyze at scale. One of the authors of this paper has ventured out in the urban world and conducted smellwalks in a variety of cities: participants were exposed to a range of different smellscapes and asked to record their experiences. As a result, smell-related words have been collected and classified, creating the first dictionary for urban smell. Here we explore the possibility of using social media data to reliably map the smells of entire cities. To this end, for both Barcelona and London, we collect geo-referenced picture tags from Flickr and Instagram, and geo-referenced tweets from Twitter. We match those tags and tweets with the words in the smell dictionary. We find that smell-related words are best classified in ten categories. We also find that specific categories (e.g., industry, transport, cleaning) correlate with governmental air quality indicators, adding validity to our study.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, Proceedings of 9th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM2015

Sensory Coding in William Faulkner\u27s Novels: Investigating Class, Gender, Queerness, and Race through a Non-Visual Paradigm

ABSTRACT Although the title of William Faulkner’s famous novel The Sound and the Fury overtly references the senses, most critics have focused on the fury rather than on the sound. However, Faulkner’s stories, vividly and descriptively set in the U.S. South, contain not only characters and plot, but also depict a rich sensory world. To neglect the way Faulkner’s characters employ their senses is to miss subtle but important clues regarding societal codes that structure hierarchies of class, gender, queerness, and race in his novels. Thus, a more complete examination of the sensory world in Faulkner’s fiction across multiple texts seems necessary to explore how Faulkner’s characters interpret the sensory stimuli in their fictional landscape and how their actions in this regard reveal the larger social constructs functioning in the novels. In particular, this dissertation seeks to borrow the theoretical approach known in fields such as history, anthropology, and sociology as sensory studies to examine nine Faulkner novels: Absalom, Absalom!, As I Lay Dying, Go Down, Moses, The Hamlet, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (The Wild Palms), Light in August, The Sound and the Fury, The Town, and The Unvanquished. Such an approach requires moving away from examining sensory stimuli as symbols that are read the same way by everyone; instead, the way Faulkner’s characters use the senses is examined as a biased act, an act that is committed and interpreted differently depending on who is doing the sensing. Using this type of sensory studies framework can transform close readings of Faulkner’s texts, particularly since such an approach helps us understand the way the senses are constantly interwoven with characters’ attempts to define (and sometimes confine) the other characters. In fact, exploring the way characters actively use their senses to categorize others can reveal a hidden discourse, one where the language of the senses illuminates belief-systems in ways that are not otherwise obvious

An Empirical Investigation of Code Smell ‘Deception’ and Research Contextualisation through Paul’s Criteria

Code smells represent code decay and as such should be eradicated from a system to prevent future maintenance problems. A range of twenty smells described by Fowler and Beck each require varying numbers and combinations of refactorings in order to be eradicated — but exactly how many are needed when we consider related, nested refactorings is unclear. In this paper, we enumerate these refactorings when categorised according to Mantyla’s smell taxonomy. We then show how, ironically, the ‘smelliest’ of smells (and hence most difficult to eradicate) are actually those best understood by developers. So, code smells are not only unpleasant to have around, but are deceptive in their nature and make-up. The study is thus a warning against attempting to eradicate what are seemingly easily eradicated smells — these are often the smells the developer needs to be most wary of. Finally, we incorporate the answers to six questions suggested by Paul for ‘How to write a paper properly’ to position the paper in a reflective way

Organic Morality: A Poetic Garden Rhetoric Originating in the 18th Century

Many literary critics have researched and conjectured on the 18 th century poets’ connections to the developing landscape gardens of the time. For example, Francesca Orestano, in “Bust Story: Pope at Stowe, or the Politics and Myths of Landscape Gardening,” discusses at length the presence and creation of Pope’s development of aesthetics at the Stowe landscape gardens. However, most critics have focused solely on the idea of the aesthetic that gardens create and their relationship to the human experience of nature. Markus Poetzsch, in “From Eco­Politics to Apocalypse: The Contentious Rhetoric of Eighteenth­Century Landscape Gardening,” describes the heated political world of landscape creation and critique. Other critics have focused on the politicized nature of gardening during the time period. Orestano discusses the changing political viewpoints of 18 th century poets based on their writings about landscaping styles, while David C. Streatfield, in his article, “Art and Nature in the English Landscape Garden: Design Theory and Practice, 1700­1818,” evaluated Pope’s standards and methods of judging and inventing beauty and aestheticism in a garden. For most of these critics, the aesthetic, rather than the productive, nature of the garden has been their focus. Some critics, such as have written about the prescriptive, not merely the descriptive, nature of poetry regarding gardens at that time, giving the poem the power of change in the developing strictures of what made a “good” landscape garden in the 18 th century. In my research, however, I have not yet found a critic that has explored these poets through a lens of environmental morality. This paper will investigate how poets looked at gardens in the 18 th century and how they create a way of looking at gardens that has snowballed into our modern day obsession with organic gardening. The paper will then investigate the rhetoric of organic gardening and its connection to the writers in question. It will explore the concept of environmental morality as a moral structure that finds its motivation within the relationship between human and nature. In other words, a moral system that is based on the environmental would look at nature and how humans treat and use nature, otherwise known as gardening, as a method by which the virtue of a person can be discovered. These authors, unlike their predecessors, such as Andrew Marvell who used gardens as a scene or object of description in poetry, used poetry as a way to analyze and moralize gardens and the act of gardening. They create a discourse of garden morality that has morphed over time into the discourse surrounding organic gardening today. This eco­critical analysis of the poets Alexander Pope, Stephen Duck, and William Cowper will expound upon this idea and explore the connection between their works, 18th century landscape gardening, and the development of an organic-­based garden morality system that has come to the forefront of our society toda

Organic Morality: A Poetic Garden Rhetoric Originating in the 18th Century

Many literary critics have researched and conjectured on the 18 th century poets’ connections to the developing landscape gardens of the time. For example, Francesca Orestano, in “Bust Story: Pope at Stowe, or the Politics and Myths of Landscape Gardening,” discusses at length the presence and creation of Pope’s development of aesthetics at the Stowe landscape gardens. However, most critics have focused solely on the idea of the aesthetic that gardens create and their relationship to the human experience of nature. Markus Poetzsch, in “From Eco­Politics to Apocalypse: The Contentious Rhetoric of Eighteenth­Century Landscape Gardening,” describes the heated political world of landscape creation and critique. Other critics have focused on the politicized nature of gardening during the time period. Orestano discusses the changing political viewpoints of 18 th century poets based on their writings about landscaping styles, while David C. Streatfield, in his article, “Art and Nature in the English Landscape Garden: Design Theory and Practice, 1700­1818,” evaluated Pope’s standards and methods of judging and inventing beauty and aestheticism in a garden. For most of these critics, the aesthetic, rather than the productive, nature of the garden has been their focus. Some critics, such as have written about the prescriptive, not merely the descriptive, nature of poetry regarding gardens at that time, giving the poem the power of change in the developing strictures of what made a “good” landscape garden in the 18 th century. In my research, however, I have not yet found a critic that has explored these poets through a lens of environmental morality. This paper will investigate how poets looked at gardens in the 18 th century and how they create a way of looking at gardens that has snowballed into our modern day obsession with organic gardening. The paper will then investigate the rhetoric of organic gardening and its connection to the writers in question. It will explore the concept of environmental morality as a moral structure that finds its motivation within the relationship between human and nature. In other words, a moral system that is based on the environmental would look at nature and how humans treat and use nature, otherwise known as gardening, as a method by which the virtue of a person can be discovered. These authors, unlike their predecessors, such as Andrew Marvell who used gardens as a scene or object of description in poetry, used poetry as a way to analyze and moralize gardens and the act of gardening. They create a discourse of garden morality that has morphed over time into the discourse surrounding organic gardening today. This eco­critical analysis of the poets Alexander Pope, Stephen Duck, and William Cowper will expound upon this idea and explore the connection between their works, 18th century landscape gardening, and the development of an organic-­based garden morality system that has come to the forefront of our society toda

Improving software quality using an ontology-based approach

Ensuring quality in software development is a challenging process. The concepts of anti-pattern and bad code smells utilize the knowledge of reoccurring problems to improve the quality of current and future software development. Anti-patterns describe recurring bad design solutions while bad code smells describe source code that is error-free but difficult to understand and maintain. Code refactoring aims to remove bad code smells without changing a program’s functionality while improving program quality. There are metrics-based tools to detect a few bad code smells from source code; however, the knowledge and understanding of these indicators of low quality software are still insufficient to resolve many of the problems they represent. Minimal research addresses the relationships between or among bad code smells, anti-patterns and refactoring. In this research, we present a new ontology, Ontology for Anti-patterns, Bad Code Smells and Refactoring (OABR), to define the concepts and their relation properties. Such an ontological infrastructure encourages a common understanding of these concepts among the software community and provides more concise definitions that help to avoid overlapping and inconsistent description. It utilizes reasoning capabilities associated with ontology to analyze the software development domain and offer new insights into the domain. Software quality issues such as understandability and maintainability can be improved by identifying and resolving anti-patterns associated with code smells as well as preventing bad code smells before coding begins