Practitioners' Expectations on Code Smell Detection

Code smell detection can automatically identify code smells in software source code to help developers to improve code maintainability, readability, and overall code quality. Currently, a wide variety of code smell detection techniques/tools are proposed for practical use. However, it is unclear wha...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in2024 IEEE 48th Annual Computers, Software, and Applications Conference (COMPSAC) pp. 1324 - 1333
Main Authors Zhang, Zexian, Yin, Shuang, Wei, Wenliu, Ma, Xiaoxue, Keung, Jacky Wai, Li, Fuyang, Hu, Wenhua
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 02.07.2024
Subjects
Accuracy
Bibliographies
Code Smell Detection
Codes
Empirical Study
Focusing
Practitioners' Expectations
Software
Source coding
Surveys
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Summary:Code smell detection can automatically identify code smells in software source code to help developers to improve code maintainability, readability, and overall code quality. Currently, a wide variety of code smell detection techniques/tools are proposed for practical use. However, it is unclear what practitioners expect for code smell detection tools and whether the existing research meets their needs. To fill the gap, we conduct an empirical study. We first interview 10 software development professionals and subsequently survey 310 software practitioners about their practices and expectations of code smell detection tools. In addition, we conduct an extensive literature review of code smell detection papers published in major publications from 2014 to 2024, and compare current research findings with practitioners' expectations. From this comparison, we highlight the direction in which researchers need to work to develop code smell detection techniques that are important to practitioners.
ISSN:2836-3795
DOI:10.1109/COMPSAC61105.2024.00175