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A Lightweight Approach for Detection of Code Smells

  • Research Article - Computer Engineering and Computer Science
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Abstract

The accurate removal of code smells from source code supports activities such as refactoring, maintenance, examining code quality etc. A large number of techniques and tools are presented for the specification and detection of code smells from source code in the last decade, but they still lack accuracy and flexibility due to different interpretations of code smell definitions. Most techniques target just detection of few code smells and render different results on the same examined systems due to different informal definitions and threshold values of metrics used for detecting code smells. We present a flexible and lightweight approach based on multiple searching techniques for the detection and visualization of all 22 code smells from source code of multiple languages. Our approach is lightweight and flexible due to application of SQL queries on intermediate repository and use of regular expressions on selected source code constructs. The concept of approach is validated by performing experiments on eight publicly available open source software projects developed using Java and C# programming languages, and results are compared with existing approaches. The accuracy of presented approach varies from 86–97 % on the eight selected software projects.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Lahore, Pakistan

    Ghulam Rasool

  2. Department of Computer Science, Punjab University Gujranwala Campus, Gujranwala, Pakistan

    Zeeshan Arshad

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  1. Ghulam Rasool
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  2. Zeeshan Arshad
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Correspondence to Ghulam Rasool.

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Rasool, G., Arshad, Z. A Lightweight Approach for Detection of Code Smells. Arab J Sci Eng 42, 483–506 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13369-016-2238-8

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