AuthorsE. van Emden and L. Moonen
TitleJava Quality Assurance by Detecting Code Smells
StatusAccepted
Publication TypeProceedings, refereed
Year of Publication2002
Conference NameProceedings 9th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE)
Pagination97-106
Date Publishedoct
PublisherIEEE
Abstract

Software inspection is a known technique for improving software quality. It involves carefully examining the code, the\~design, and the documentation of software and checking\~these for aspects that are known to be potentially problematic based on past experience. Code smells are a metaphor to describe patterns that areġenerally associated with bad design and bad programming\~practices. Originally, code smells are used to {fi}nd the places\~in software that could bene{fi}t from refactoring. In this paper,\~we investigate how the quality of code can be automaticallyãssessed by checking for the presence of code smells and how\~this approach can contribute to automatic code inspection. We present an approach for the automatic detection and\~visualization of code smells and discuss how this approach\~can be used in the design of a software inspection tool. We illustrate the feasibility of our approach with the developmentõf jCOSMO, a prototype code smell browser that detects and\~visualizes code smells in JAVA source code. Finally, we show\~how this tool was applied in a case study. Keywords: software inspection, quality assurance, Java,\~refactoring, code smells.

Citation KeySimula.SE.503