A heuristic-based approach to code-smell detection

Encapsulation and data hiding are central tenets of the object oriented paradigm. Deciding what data and behaviour to form into a class and where to draw the line between its public and private details can make the difference between a class that is an understandable, flexible and reusable abstraction and one which is not. This decision is a difficult one and may easily result in poor encapsulation which can then have serious implications for a number of system qualities. It is often hard to identify such encapsulation problems within large software systems until they cause a maintenance problem (which is usually too late) and attempting to perform such analysis manually can also be tedious and error prone. Two of the common encapsulation problems that can arise as a consequence of this decomposition process are data classes and god classes. Typically, these two problems occur together – data classes are lacking in functionality that has typically been sucked into an over-complicated and domineering god class. This paper describes the architecture of a tool which automatically detects data and god classes that has been developed as a plug-in for the Eclipse IDE. The technique has been evaluated in a controlled study on two large open source systems which compare the tool results to similar work by Marinescu, who employs a metrics-based approach to detecting such features. The study provides some valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the two approache

Next generation software environments : principles, problems, and research directions

The past decade has seen a burgeoning of research and development in software environments. Conferences have been devoted to the topic of practical environments, journal papers produced, and commercial systems sold. Given all the activity, one might expect a great deal of consensus on issues, approaches, and techniques. This is not the case, however. Indeed, the term "environment" is still used in a variety of conflicting ways. Nevertheless substantial progress has been made and we are at least nearing consensus on many critical issues.The purpose of this paper is to characterize environments, describe several important principles that have emerged in the last decade or so, note current open problems, and describe some approaches to these problems, with particular emphasis on the activities of one large-scale research program, the Arcadia project. Consideration is also given to two related topics: empirical evaluation and technology transition. That is, how can environments and their constituents be evaluated, and how can new developments be moved effectively into the production sector

What to Fix? Distinguishing between design and non-design rules in automated tools

Technical debt---design shortcuts taken to optimize for delivery speed---is a critical part of long-term software costs. Consequently, automatically detecting technical debt is a high priority for software practitioners. Software quality tool vendors have responded to this need by positioning their tools to detect and manage technical debt. While these tools bundle a number of rules, it is hard for users to understand which rules identify design issues, as opposed to syntactic quality. This is important, since previous studies have revealed the most significant technical debt is related to design issues. Other research has focused on comparing these tools on open source projects, but these comparisons have not looked at whether the rules were relevant to design. We conducted an empirical study using a structured categorization approach, and manually classify 466 software quality rules from three industry tools---CAST, SonarQube, and NDepend. We found that most of these rules were easily labeled as either not design (55%) or design (19%). The remainder (26%) resulted in disagreements among the labelers. Our results are a first step in formalizing a definition of a design rule, in order to support automatic detection.Comment: Long version of accepted short paper at International Conference on Software Architecture 2017 (Gothenburg, SE