Merging Smell Detectors: Evidence on the Agreement of Multiple Tools
Technical Debt estimation relies heavily on the use of static analysis tools looking for violations of pre-defined rules. Largely, Technical Debt principal is attributed to the presence of low-level code smells, unavoidably tying the effort for fixing the problems with mere coding inefficiencies. At the same time, despite their simple definition, the detection of most code smells is non-trivial and subjective, rendering the assessment of Technical Debt principal dubious. To this end, we have revisited the literature on code smell detection approaches backed by tools and developed an Eclipse plugin that incorporates six code smell detection approaches. The combined application of various smell detectors can increase the certainty of identifying actual code smells that matter to the development team. We also conduct a case study to investigate the agreement among the employed code smell detectors. To our surprise the level of agreement is quite low even for relatively simple code smells threating the validity of existing TD analysis tools and calling for increased attention to the precise specification of code and design level issues.
Tue 17 MayDisplayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change
13:00 - 13:50 | |||
13:00 16mTalk | An Architecture Smell Knowledge Base for Managing Architecture Technical Debt Technical Papers | ||
13:16 16mTalk | Sonarlizer Xplorer: a tool to mine Github projects and identify technical debt items using SonarQube Tools Track Diogo Pina University of São Paulo, Alfredo Goldman University of São Paulo, Carolyn Seaman University of Maryland Baltimore County | ||
13:33 16mTalk | Merging Smell Detectors: Evidence on the Agreement of Multiple Tools Tools Track Apostolos Ichtsis University of Macedonia, Nikolaos Mittas International Hellenic University, Apostolos Ampatzoglou University of Macedonia, Alexander Chatzigeorgiou University of Macedonia |