An approach to prioritize code smells for refactoring

Abstract

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 amount of problems that the developer can deal with, particularly when the effort available for performing refactorings is limited. Moreover, not all the code smells are equally relevant to the goals of the system or its health. This article presents a semi-automated approach that helps developers focus on the most critical problems of the system. We have developed a tool that suggests a ranking of code smells, based on a combination of three criteria, namely: past component modifications, important modifiability scenarios for the system, and relevance of the kind of smell. These criteria are complementary and enable our approach to assess the smells from different perspectives. Our approach has been evaluated in two case-studies, and the results show that the suggested code smells are useful to developers.