Do Code Smells Impact the Effort of Different Maintenance Programming Activities?

Do Code Smells Impact the Effort of Different Maintenance Programming Activities?. Soh, Z., Yamashita, A., Khomh, F., & Gu�h�neuc, Y. In Lanza, M. & Kamei, Y., editors, Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering (SANER), pages 393–402, March, 2016. IEEE CS Press. 10 pages.

Paper abstract bibtex

Empirical studies have shown insofar that code smells have relatively low impact over maintenance effort at file level. We surmise that previous studies have found low effects of code smells because the effort considered is a ``sheer-effort'' that does not distinguish between the types of activities. In our study, we investigate the effects of code smells at different level: at activity level. Examples of activities are: reading, editing, searching, and navigating, which are performed independently over different files during maintenance. We conjecture that structural attributes represented in the form of different code smells do indeed have an effect on the effort for performing certain kinds of activities. To verify this conjecture, we revisit a previous study about the impact of code smell on maintenance effort, using the same dataset, but considering activity effort. Results show that different code smells affect differently activity effort. Yet, the size of the changes preformed to solve the task impacts the effort of all activities more than code smells and file size. While code smells impact the editing and navigating effort more than file size, the file size impacts the reading and searching activities more than code smells. One major implication of these results is that if code smells indeed affect the effort of certain kinds of activities, it means that their effects are contingent on the type of maintenance task at hand, where some types of activities will become more predominant than others.

@INPROCEEDINGS{Soh16-SANER-Noises,
   AUTHOR       = {Z�phyrin Soh and Aiko Yamashita and Foutse Khomh and 
      Yann-Ga�l Gu�h�neuc},
   BOOKTITLE    = {Proceedings of the 23<sup>rd</sup> International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering (SANER)},
   TITLE        = {Do Code Smells Impact the Effort of Different 
      Maintenance Programming Activities?},
   YEAR         = {2016},
   OPTADDRESS   = {},
   OPTCROSSREF  = {},
   EDITOR       = {Michele Lanza and Yasutaka Kamei},
   MONTH        = {March},
   NOTE         = {10 pages.},
   OPTNUMBER    = {},
   OPTORGANIZATION = {},
   PAGES        = {393--402},
   PUBLISHER    = {IEEE CS Press},
   OPTSERIES    = {},
   OPTVOLUME    = {},
   KEYWORDS     = {Topic: <b>Program comprehension</b>, 
      Venue: <c>SANER</c>},
   URL          = {http://www.ptidej.net/publications/documents/SANER16a.doc.pdf},
   PDF          = {http://www.ptidej.net/publications/documents/SANER16a.ppt.pdf},
   ABSTRACT     = {Empirical studies have shown insofar that code smells 
      have relatively low impact over maintenance effort at file level. We 
      surmise that previous studies have found low effects of code smells 
      because the effort considered is a ``sheer-effort'' that does not 
      distinguish between the types of activities. In our study, we 
      investigate the effects of code smells at different level: at 
      activity level. Examples of activities are: reading, editing, 
      searching, and navigating, which are performed independently over 
      different files during maintenance. We conjecture that structural 
      attributes represented in the form of different code smells do indeed 
      have an effect on the effort for performing certain kinds of 
      activities. To verify this conjecture, we revisit a previous study 
      about the impact of code smell on maintenance effort, using the same 
      dataset, but considering activity effort. Results show that different 
      code smells affect differently activity effort. Yet, the size of the 
      changes preformed to solve the task impacts the effort of all 
      activities more than code smells and file size. While code smells 
      impact the editing and navigating effort more than file size, the 
      file size impacts the reading and searching activities more than code 
      smells. One major implication of these results is that if code smells 
      indeed affect the effort of certain kinds of activities, it means 
      that their effects are contingent on the type of maintenance task at 
      hand, where some types of activities will become more predominant 
      than others.}
}

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