An Exploratory Study on the Influence of Developers in Code Smell Introduction

摘要

A code smell is any symptom in the source code that possibly indicates a deeper maintainability problem. Code smell introduction is a creative task - developers unintentionally introduce code smells in their programs. In this study, we try to obtain a deeper understanding on the relationship between developers and code smell introduction on a software. We analyzed instances of code smells previously reported in the literature and our study involved over 6000 commits of 5 open source object-oriented systems. First, we analyzed the distributions of developers using specific characteristics to classify the developers into groups. Then, we investigated the relationships between types of developers and code smells. The outcome of our evaluation suggests that the way a developer participates in the project may be associated with code smell introduction.