A Study of Relevant Parameters Influencing Code Smell Prioritization in Object-Oriented Software Systems

Abstract

Code smells are indicators of some design flaws in the software code. The evolutionary property of an object-oriented software product increases the number of code smells with every release of a version of the product. These code smells like to hamper the quality of the software system. During software maintenance, it becomes cost and effort-intensive to eliminate such a large number of smells due to time and budget constraints. This demands the prioritization of code smells where the developers are with top severe smells to save time and effort. Before proposing any prioritization approach, it becomes important to Figure out the need for code smell elimination using different refactoring activities. Following this, it is imperative to understand the role of different relevant elements in code smell prioritization. To address this need, this paper highlights the drawbacks of code smells as well as provides an overview of several prioritization-related elements such as factors, subject programs, performance metrics, and detection tools. This would help the researchers in getting a preliminary understanding of various parameters that are crucial for proposing and validating code smell prioritization approaches.