Smells vs. Software Antipatterns: Do Definitions Matter?
Richard R. Rivera, Marcela Mosquera, Pamela Flores, Carlos E. Anchundia, Alejandro Jiménez, Xavier Carpio · 2025
The concepts of software antipatterns and smells are foundational to understanding and improving software quality. However, their definitions often lack consistency and the boundaries between them frequently blur, leading to confusion in both academic and industrial contexts. This paper presents research in progress that focuses on understanding the differences and similarities between using the terms antipattern and smell. We briefly reviewed the literature to gather information about definitions, categories, and understanding between antipatterns and smells. The findings indicate that there exists a substantial difference between those terms that could influence the technical debt. Furthermore, practitioners and researchers seem to use both terms indistinctly, being “smell” the most popular; however, this ambiguity could bias practitioners away from an optimal solution.