An Exploratory Study of the Impact of Code Smells on Software Change-proneness. Khomh, F., Di Penta, M., & Gu�h�neuc, Y. In Antoniol, G. & Zaidman, A., editors, Proceedings of the 16<sup>th</sup> Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE), pages 75–84, October, 2009. IEEE CS Press. 10 pages.
An Exploratory Study of the Impact of Code Smells on Software Change-proneness [pdf]Paper  abstract   bibtex   
Code smells are poor implementation choices, thought to make object-orien­ted systems hard to maintain. In this study, we investigate if classes with code smells are more change-prone than classes without smells. Specifically, we test the general hypothesis: classes with code smells are not more change prone than other classes. We detect 29 code smells in 9 releases of Azureus and in 13 releases of Eclipse, and study the relation between classes with these code smells and class change-proneness. We show that, in almost all releases of Azureus and Eclipse, classes with code smells are more change-prone than others, and that specific smells are more correlated than others to change-proneness. These results justify \empha posteriori previous work on the specification and detection of code smells and could help focusing quality assurance and testing activities.

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