On the diffuseness and the impact on maintainability of code smells
Fabio Palomba, Gabriele Bavota, Massimiliano Di Penta, Fausto Fasano, Rocco Oliveto, Andrea De Lucia · 2018
Code smells were defined as symptoms of poor design choices applied by programmers during the development of a software project [2]. They might hinder the comprehensibility and maintainability of software systems [5]. Similarly to some previous work [3, 4, 6, 7] in this paper we investigate the relationship between the presence of code smells and the software change- and fault-proneness. Specifically, while previous work shows a significant correlation between smells and code change/fault-proneness, the empirical evidence provided so far is still limited because of: