research-article

On experimenting refactoring tools to remove code smells

Authors:

Francesca Arcelli Fontana,

Marco Mangiacavalli,

Domenico Pochiero,

Marco ZanoniAuthors Info & Claims

XP '15 workshops: Scientific Workshop Proceedings of the XP2015

Article No.: 7, Pages 1 - 8

https://doi.org/10.1145/2764979.2764986

Published: 25 May 2015 Publication History

Abstract

When we develop a software project of a certain complexity, source code maintainability could become a problem, in particular if developers do not use a consolidate development process that simplifies the management of the entire project. When source code becomes very complex, it is difficult for developers to share and modify it. We can improve internal software qualities such as reusability, maintainability and readability through refactoring. Refactoring can be applied to remove possible problems in the code, as code smells. Identifying code smells and removing them through refactoring results in better code maintainability, but it can be an overwhelming task. In this paper, we describe our experimentation on using four refactoring tools to remove code smells in four systems, with the aim to outline advantages and disadvantages of the tools with respect to the accomplishment of this task, and to identify the smells easier to be removed among the ones we considered in this paper.

References

[1]

F. Arcelli Fontana, P. Braione, and M. Zanoni. Automatic detection of bad smells in code: An experimental assessment. Journal of Object Technology, 11(2):5: 1--38, 2012.

[2]

F. Arcelli Fontana, V. Ferme, and M. Zanoni. Towards assessing software architecture quality by exploiting code smell relations. In to appear in IEEE Proceedings of SAM 2015 workshop, co-located with ICSE 2015, May 2015.

[3]

F. Arcelli Fontana and S. Spinelli. Impact of refactoring on quality code evaluation. In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Refactoring Tools (WRT '11), pages 37--40, Waikiki, Honolulu, HI, USA, May 2011. ACM.

Digital Library

[4]

F. Arcelli Fontana, M. Zanoni, and F. Zanoni. A duplicated code refactoring advisor. In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Agile Software Development (XP 2015). Springer, May 2015.

[5]

R. Arcoverde, A. Garcia, and E. Figueiredo. Understanding the longevity of code smells: preliminary results of an explanatory survey. In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Refactoring Tools (WRT '11), pages 33--36, Waikiki, Honolulu, HI, USA, May 2011. ACM.

Digital Library

[6]

K. Beck, M. Fowler, and G. Beck. Bad smells in code. Refactoring: Improving the design of existing code. Addison-Wesley Object Technology Series, pages 75--88, 1999.

[7]

S. Counsell, R. Hierons, H. Hamza, S. Black, and M. Durrand. Is a strategy for code smell assessment long overdue? In Proceedings of the 2010 ICSE Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Metrics (WETSoM '10), pages 32--38, Cape Town, South Africa, 2010. ACM.

Digital Library

[8]

M. Z. Drozdz. A critical analysis of two refactoring tools. 2008. Master Thesis. University of Pretoria.

[9]

A. Hamid, M. Ilyas, M. Hummayun, and A. Nawaz. A comparative study on code smell detection tools. International Journal of Advanced Science and Technology, 2013.

[10]

M. Kim, M. Gee, A. Loh, and N. Rachatasumrit. Ref-finder: a refactoring reconstruction tool based on logic query templates. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering (FSE '10), pages 371--372, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, Nov. 2010. ACM.

Digital Library

[11]

M. Lanza, R. Marinescu, and S. Ducasse. Object-oriented metrics in practice. Springer, 2006.

Digital Library

[12]

T. Mens and T. Tourwé. A survey of software refactoring. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 30(2):126--139, 2004.

Digital Library

[13]

E. Murphy-Hill, C. Parnin, and A. P. Black. How we refactor, and how we know it. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 38(1):5--18, 2012.

Digital Library

[14]

J. Pérez and Y. Crespo. Perspectives on automated correction of bad smells. In Proceedings of the joint international and annual ERCIM workshops on Principles of software evolution (IWPSE) and software evolution (Evol) workshops (IWPSE-Evol '09), pages 99--108. ACM, Aug. 2009.

Digital Library

[15]

J. Simmonds and T. Mens. A comparison of software refactoring tools. Technical report, 2002.

[16]

G. Szőke, C. Nagy, R. Ferenc, and T. Gyimóthy. Case study of refactoring large-scale industrial systems to efficiently improve source code quality. In Computational Science and Its Applications--ICCSA 2014, pages 524--540. Springer, 2014.

[17]

E. Tempero, C. Anslow, J. Dietrich, T. Han, J. Li, M. Lumpe, H. Melton, and J. Noble. Qualitas corpus: A curated collection of java code for empirical studies. In 2010 Asia Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC2010), pages 336--345, Dec. 2010.

Digital Library

[18]

W. C. Wake. Refactoring workbook. Addison-Wesley Professional, 2004.

Digital Library

Cited By

Baumgartner NAdleh FPulvermüller E(2024)Advancing Code Smell Detection: Live Global Data Detection and Data Clumps TestcasesEvaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering10.1007/978-3-031-64182-4_11(230-250)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-64182-4_11
Mourya SSingh PSingh V(2024)An Insight into Code Smell Detection ToolReliability Engineering for Industrial Processes10.1007/978-3-031-55048-5_17(245-273)Online publication date: 23-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-55048-5_17
dos Reis JAbreu Fde F. Carneiro GAlmeida D(2023)Scientific Workflow Management for Software Quality Assessment Replication: An Open Source ArchitectureQuality of Information and Communications Technology10.1007/978-3-031-43703-8_1(1-14)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43703-8_1
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

On experimenting refactoring tools to remove code smells

Recommendations

An interactive ambient visualization for code smells
SOFTVIS '10: Proceedings of the 5th international symposium on Software visualization

Code smells are characteristics of software that indicate that code may have a design problem. Code smells have been proposed as a way for programmers to recognize the need for restructuring their software. Because code smells can go unnoticed while ...
Prioritising Refactoring Using Code Bad Smells
ICSTW '11: Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE Fourth International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation Workshops

We investigated the relationship between six of Fowler et al.'s Code Bad Smells (Duplicated Code, Data Clumps, Switch Statements, Speculative Generality, Message Chains, and Middle Man) and software faults. In this paper we discuss how our results can ...
An approach to prioritize code smells for refactoring

Code smells are a popular mechanism to find structural design problems in software systems. Consequently, several tools have emerged to support the detection of code smells. However, the number of smells returned by current tools usually exceeds the ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences

XP '15 workshops: Scientific Workshop Proceedings of the XP2015

May 2015

76 pages

ISBN:9781450334099

DOI:10.1145/2764979

Conference Chair:
Maria Paasivaara

Copyright © 2015 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 25 May 2015

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

XP 2015 Workshops

XP 2015 Workshops: XP 2015 Scientific Workshops Proceedings

May 25 - 29, 2015

Helsinki, Finland

Acceptance Rates

XP '15 workshops Paper Acceptance Rate 11 of 15 submissions, 73%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 11 of 15 submissions, 73%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

20
Total Citations
View Citations
468
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)43
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)5

Reflects downloads up to 23 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Baumgartner NAdleh FPulvermüller E(2024)Advancing Code Smell Detection: Live Global Data Detection and Data Clumps TestcasesEvaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering10.1007/978-3-031-64182-4_11(230-250)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-64182-4_11
Mourya SSingh PSingh V(2024)An Insight into Code Smell Detection ToolReliability Engineering for Industrial Processes10.1007/978-3-031-55048-5_17(245-273)Online publication date: 23-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-55048-5_17
dos Reis JAbreu Fde F. Carneiro GAlmeida D(2023)Scientific Workflow Management for Software Quality Assessment Replication: An Open Source ArchitectureQuality of Information and Communications Technology10.1007/978-3-031-43703-8_1(1-14)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43703-8_1
Bibiano ADwyer M(2022)Completeness of composite refactorings for smell removalProceedings of the ACM/IEEE 44th International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings10.1145/3510454.3517060(264-268)Online publication date: 21-May-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3510454.3517060
Bibiano A(2022)Completeness of Composite Refactorings for Smell Removal2022 IEEE/ACM 44th International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings (ICSE-Companion)10.1109/ICSE-Companion55297.2022.9793758(264-268)Online publication date: May-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE-Companion55297.2022.9793758
Gattal AHammache ABousbia NHenniche AHung CHong JBechini ASong E(2021)Exploiting the progress of OO refactoring tools with Android code smellsProceedings of the 36th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing10.1145/3412841.3442129(1580-1583)Online publication date: 22-Mar-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3412841.3442129
Yin XShi CZhao S(2021)Local and Global Feature Based Explainable Feature Envy Detection2021 IEEE 45th Annual Computers, Software, and Applications Conference (COMPSAC)10.1109/COMPSAC51774.2021.00127(942-951)Online publication date: Jul-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/COMPSAC51774.2021.00127
Peruma ASimmons SAlOmar ENewman CMkaouer MOuni A(2021)How do i refactor this? An empirical study on refactoring trends and topics in Stack OverflowEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-021-10045-x27:1Online publication date: 23-Oct-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-021-10045-x
Lima RSouza JFonseca BTeixeira LGheyi RRibeiro MGarcia Ade Mello RCavalcante EDantas FBatista T(2020)Understanding and Detecting Harmful CodeProceedings of the XXXIV Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering10.1145/3422392.3422420(223-232)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3422392.3422420
Bibiano ASoares VCoutinho DFernandes ECorreia JSantos KOliveira AGarcia AGheyi RFonseca BRibeiro MBarbosa COliveira D(2020)How Does Incomplete Composite Refactoring Affect Internal Quality Attributes?Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Program Comprehension10.1145/3387904.3389264(149-159)Online publication date: 13-Jul-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3387904.3389264
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents