An Empirical Study on the Evolution of Design Smells

Abstract

The evolution of software systems often leads to its architectural degradation due to the presence of design problems. In the literature, design smells have been defined as indicators of such problems. In particular, the presence of design smells could indicate the use of constructs that are harmful to system maintenance activities. In this work, an investigation on the nature and presence of design smells has been performed. An empirical study has been conducted considering the complete history of eight software systems, commit by commit. The detection of instances of multiple design smell types has been performed at each commit, and the analysis of the relationships between the detected smells and the maintenance activities, specifically due to refactoring activities, has been investigated. The proposed study evidenced that classes affected by design smells are more subject to change, especially when multiple smells are detected in the same classes. Moreover, it emerged that in some cases these smells are removed, and this occurs involving more smells at the same time. Finally, results indicate that smells removals are not correlated to the refactoring activities.

Keywords

• technical debt
• design smells
• software maintenance
• software evolution