The scent of a smell
Fabio Palomba, Annibale Panichella, Andy Zaidman, Rocco Oliveto, Andrea De Lucia · 2018
Code smells, i.e., symptoms of poor design and implementation choices applied by programmers during the development of a software project [2], represent an important factor contributing to technical debt [3]. The research community spent a lot of effort studying the extent to which code smells tend to remain in a software project for long periods of time [9], as well as their negative impact on non-functional properties of source code [4, 7]. As a consequence, several tools and techniques have been proposed to help developers in detecting code smells and to suggest refactoring opportunities (e.g., [5, 6, 8]).