More Like this

1. Qualitative Analysis of the Relationship Between Design Smells and Software Engineering Challenges

   Imran, A; Kosar, T (October 2022, Proceedings of ACM European Symposium on Software Engineering (ESSE 2022))

   Software design debt aims to elucidate the rectification attempts of the present design flaws and studies the influence of those to the cost and time of the software. Design smells are a key cause of incurring design debt. Although the impact of design smells on design debt have been predominantly considered in current literature, how design smells are caused due to not following software engineering best practices require more exploration. This research provides a tool which is used for design smell detection in Java software by analyzing large volume of source codes. More specifically, 409,539 Lines of Code (LoC) and 17,760 class files of open source Java software are analyzed here. Obtained results show desirable precision values ranging from 81.01% to 93.43%. Based on the output of the tool, a study is conducted to relate the cause of the detected design smells to two software engineering challenges namely "irregular team meetings" and "scope creep". As a result, the gained information will provide insight to the software engineers to take necessary steps of design remediation actions. 

   more » « less
2. Automated Microservice Code-Smell Detection

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6385-4_20  

   Walker, A.; Das, D.; Cerny, T. (April 2021, Information Science and Applications. Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering)

   null; null; null (Ed.)

   Microservice Architecture (MSA) is rapidly taking over modern software engineering and becoming the predominant architecture of new cloud-based applications (apps). There are many advantages to using MSA, but there are many downsides to using a more complex architecture than a typical monolithic enterprise app. Beyond the normal bad coding practices and code-smells of a typical app, MSA specific code-smells are difficult to discover within a distributed app. There are many static code analysis tools for monolithic apps, but no tool exists to offer code-smell detection for MSA-based apps. This paper proposes a new approach to detect code smells in distributed apps based on MSA. We develop an open-source tool, MSANose, which can accurately detect up to eleven different types of MSA specific code smells. We demonstrate our tool through a case study on a benchmark MSA app and verify its accuracy. Our results show that it is possible to detect code-smells within MSA apps using bytecode and or source code analysis throughout the development or before deployment to production. 

   more » « less
3. Code Smell Prioritization with Business Process Mining and Static Code Analysis: A Case Study

   https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics11121880  

   Islam, Md Rofiqul; Al Maruf, Abdullah; Cerny, Tomas (June 2022, Electronics)

   One of the most significant impediments to the long-term maintainability of software applications is code smells. Keeping up with the best coding practices can be difficult for software developers, which might lead to performance throttling or code maintenance concerns. As a result, it is imperative that large applications be regularly monitored for performance issues and code smells, so that these issues can be corrected promptly. Resolving code smells in software systems can be done in a variety of ways, but doing so all at once would be prohibitively expensive and can be out of budget. Prioritizing these solutions are therefore critical. The majority of current research prioritizes code smells according to the type of smell they cause. This method, however, is not sufficient because of a lack of knowledge regarding the frequency of code usage and code changeability behavior. Even the most complex programs have some components that are more important than others. Maintaining the functionality of certain parts is essential since they are often used. Identifying and correcting code smells in places that are frequently utilized and subject to rapid change should take precedence over other code smells. A novel strategy is proposed for finding frequently used and change-prone areas in a codebase by combining business logic, heat map information, and commit history analysis in this study. It examines the codebase, commits, and log files of Java applications to identify business processes, heat map graphs, and severity levels of various types of code smells and their commit history. This is done in order to present a comprehensive, efficient, and resource-friendly technique for identifying and prioritizing performance throttling with also handling code maintenance concerns. 

   more » « less
4. Toward Predicting Architectural Significance of Implementation Issues

   Shahbazian, Arman; Nam, Daye; Medvidovic, Nenad (May 2018, International Conference on Mining Software Repositories)

   In a software system’s development lifecycle, engineers make numerous design decisions that subsequently cause architectural change in the system. Previous studies have shown that, more often than not, these architectural changes are unintentional by-products of continual software maintenance tasks. The result of inadvertent architectural changes is accumulation of technical debt and deterioration of software quality. Despite their important implications, there is a relative shortage of techniques, tools, and empirical studies pertaining to architectural design decisions. In this paper, we take a step toward addressing that scarcity by using the information in the issue and code repositories of open-source software systems to investigate the cause and frequency of such architectural design decisions. Furthermore, building on these results, we develop a predictive model that is able to identify the architectural significance of newly submitted issues, thereby helping engineers to prevent the adverse effects of architectural decay. The results of this study are based on the analysis of 21,062 issues affecting 301 versions of 5 large open-source systems for which the code changes and issues were publicly accessible. 

   more » « less
5. Software design analysis and technical debt management based on design rule theory

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2023.107322  

   Cai, Yuanfang; Kazman, Rick (December 2023, Information and Software Technology)

   In this paper we reflect on our decade-long journey of creating, evolving, and evaluating a number of software design concepts and technical debt management technologies. These include: a novel maintainability metric, a new model for representing design information, a suite of design anti-patterns, and a formalized model of design debt. All of these concepts are rooted in options theory, and they all share the objective of helping a software project team quantify and visualize major design principles, and address the very real maintainability challenges faced by their organizations in practice. The evolution of our research has been propelled by our continuous interactions with industrial collaborators. For each concept, technology, and supporting tool, we embarked on an ambitious program of empirical validation—in “the lab”, with industry partners, and with open source projects. We reflect on the successes of this research and on areas where significant challenges remain. In particular, we observe that improved software design education, both for students and professional developers, is the prerequisite for our research and technology to be widely adopted. During this journey, we also observed a number of gaps: between what we offer in research and what practitioners need, between management and development, and between debt detection and debt reduction. Addressing these challenges motivates our research moving forward. 

   more » « less