Alternative Sources of Information for Code Smell Detection: Postcards from Far Away

Code smells have been defined as symptoms of poor design and implementation choices. Previous studies showed the negative impact of code smells on the comprehensibility and maintainability of code. For this reasons, several detection techniques have been proposed. Most of them rely on the analysis of the properties extractable from the source code. In the context of this work, we highlight several aspects that can possibly contribute to the improvement of the current state of the art and propose our solutions, based on the analysis on how code smells are actually introduced as well as the usefulness of historical and textual information to realize more reliable code smell detectors. Finally, we present an overview of the open issues and challenges related to code smell detection and management that the research community should focus on in the next future.