An Exploratory Study of the Impact of Antipatterns on Software Changeability. Khomh, F., Di Penta, M., Gu�h�neuc, Y., & Antoniol, G. Technical Report EPM-RT-2009-02, �cole Polytechnique de Montr�al, April, 2009. 15 pages.
An Exploratory Study of the Impact of Antipatterns on Software Changeability [pdf]Paper  abstract   bibtex   
Antipatterns are poor design choices that make object-orien­ted systems hard to maintain by developers. In this study, we investigate if classes that participate in antipatterns are more change-prone than classes that do not. Specifically, we test the general hypothesis: classes belonging to antipatterns are not more likely than other classes to undergo chan­ges, to be impacted when fixing issues posted in issue-tracking systems, and in particular to unhandled excep­tions-related issues—a crucial problem for any software system. We detect 11 antipatterns in 13 releases of Eclipse and study the relations between classes involved in these antipatterns and classes change-, issue-, and unhandled ex­ception-proneness. We show that, in almost all releases of Eclipse, classes with antipatterns are more change-, issue-, and un­handled-exception-prone than others. These results justify previous work on the specification and detection of antipatterns and could help focusing quality assurance and testing activities.

Downloads: 0