Assuring software quality by code smell detection

In this retrospective we will review the paper “Java Quality Assurance by Detecting Code Smells” that was published ten years ago at WCRE. The work presents an approach for the automatic detection and visualization of code smells and discusses how this approach could be used in the design of a software inspection tool. The feasibility of the proposed approach was illustrated with the development of jCOSMO, a prototype code smell browser that detects and visualizes code smells in JAVA source code. It was the first tool to automatically detect code smells in source code, and we demonstrated the application of this tool in an industrial quality assessment case study. In addition to reviewing the WCRE 2002 work, we will discuss subsequent developments in this area by looking at a selection of papers that were published in its wake. In particular, we will have a look at recent related work in which we empirically investigated the relation between code smells and software maintainability in a longitudinal study where professional developers were observed while maintaining four different software systems that exhibited known code smells. We conclude with a discussion of the lessons learned and opportunities for further research.