A Detection Tool for Code Bad Smells in Java Source Code

Abstract

Code bad smells are the indication of an unstructured code snippet that can be a problem in software design. Code bad smell deteriorates the source code quality that resulting in unnecessary maintenance cost. This paper presents a tool to automatically detect bad smells in Java software. This tool can detect eight bad smells, namely God class/large class, data class and empty catch block, comments, nested try statement, exception thrown in finally block, unprotected main program by understanding their definitions, empty catch block, dummy handler, nested try statement, exception thrown in finally block, dummy handler, and unprotected main program considered as exception handling bad smells, and these bad smells received less attention from researchers. No single tool is available to detect all considered eight code bad smells in one go.