From a Domain Analysis to the Specification and Detection of Code and Design Smells

Abstract

Code and design smells are recurring design problems in software systems that must be identified to avoid their possible negative consequences\ud on development and maintenance. Consequently, several smell detection\ud approaches and tools have been proposed in the literature. However,\ud so far, they allow the detection of predefined smells but the detection\ud of new smells or smells adapted to the context of the analysed systems\ud is possible only by implementing new detection algorithms manually.\ud Moreover, previous approaches do not explain the transition from\ud specifications of smells to their detection. Finally, the validation\ud of the existing approaches and tools has been limited on few proprietary\ud systems and on a reduced number of smells. In this paper, we introduce\ud an approach to automate the generation of detection algorithms from\ud specifications written using a domain-specific language. This language\ud is defined from a thorough domain analysis. It allows the specification\ud of smells using high-level domain-related abstractions. It allows\ud the adaptation of the specifications of smells to the context of\ud the analysed systems.We specify 10 smells, generate automatically\ud their detection algorithms using templates, and validate the algorithms\ud in terms of precision and recall on Xerces v2.7.0 and GanttProject\ud v1.10.2, two open-source object-oriented systems.We also compare\ud the detection results with those of a previous approach, iPlasma