Deodorant for Shotgun Surgery Bad Smell in IEC 61499-Based Control Software

Bad smells negatively influence different aspects of software, such as maintainability and quality. From development to maintenance, smells contribute to error-proneness and control software is no exception. Code smells are starting to gain some popularity in the domain of industrial automation and programming languages for Programmable Logic Controllers. However, they are still not as well researched as in general Software Engineering and lack appropriate support. Shotgun Surgery is a type of bad smell which can occur when changing source code. If every time a functionality is updated, many of the places where it is used need to be updated as well - we can sniff out Shotgun Surgery. This poses different challenges: being aware of all the places where this particular functionality is used and correctly updating those places. We aim to bridge the gap between bad smells and control software partially. We want to do this by developing approaches for automatic detection, visualization, and refactoring of Shotgun Surgery in IEC 61499 applications in Eclipse 4diac IDE.