A tool to prioritize code smells in distributed development

Abstract

A code smell is a symptom in the source code that helps to identify a design problem. Several tools for detecting and ranking code smells according to their criticality to the system have been developed. However, existing works assume a centralized development approach, which does not consider systems being developed in a distributed fashion. The main problem in a distributed group of developers is that a tool cannot always ensure a global vision of (smells of) the system, and thus inconsistencies among the rankings provided by each developer are likely to happen. These inconsistencies often cause unnecessary refactorings and might not focus the whole team on the critical smells system-wide. Along this line, this work proposes a multi-agent tool, called D-JSpIRIT, which helps individual developers to reach a consensus on their smell rankings by means of distributed optimization techniques.