Investigating the impact of design debt on software quality
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Managing Technical Debt
Prioritizing design debt investment opportunities
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Managing Technical Debt
Proceedings of the 11th annual international conference on Aspect-oriented Software Development
An exploratory study to investigate the impact of conceptualization in god class detection
Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering
Exploring the impact of inter-smell relations on software maintainability: an empirical study
Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Software Engineering
Do software categories impact coupling metrics?
Proceedings of the 10th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories
To what extent can maintenance problems be predicted by code smell detection? - An empirical study
Information and Software Technology
Hi-index | 0.01 |
Code smells are particular patterns in object-oriented systems that are perceived to lead to difficulties in the maintenance of such systems. It is held that to improve maintainability, code smells should be eliminated by refactoring. It is claimed that classes that are involved in certain code smells are liable to be changed more frequently and have more defects than other classes in the code. We investigated the extent to which this claim is true for God Classes and Brain Classes, with and without normalizing the effects with respect to the class size. We analyzed historical data from 7 to 10 years of the development of three open-source software systems. The results show that God and Brain Classes were changed more frequently and contained more defects than other kinds of class. However, when we normalized the measured effects with respect to size, then God and Brain Classes were less subject to change and had fewer defects than other classes. Hence, under the assumption that God and Brain Classes contain on average as much functionality per line of code as other classes, the presence of God and Brain Classes is not necessarily harmful; in fact, such classes may be an efficient way of organizing code.