Code smell prioritization in object‐oriented software systems: A systematic literature review

Abstract

AbstractCode smells indicate poor design and imperfection in coding style. They increase maintenance costs and degrade software quality. Detecting and mitigating these code smells reduce the effects of flaws present in the software design. However, to save time and effort, it is a good practice to prioritize critical code smells and resolve them first. There have been various empirical studies on code smell prioritization in the last decades. Although the research community has been continuously working on the prioritization of code smells, yet a systematic mapping of all these studies would provide a panorama of research work. With this motivation, we selected 39 primary studies published between May 2011 and May 2022 and classified them based on seven factors: (i) code smells, (ii) factors, (iii) evaluation techniques, (iv) tools, (v) ranking formulas, (vi) data sets used, and (vii) measurements used for validating the research work. This paper aims to outline and discuss the prioritization procedure for code smells in object‐oriented software systems. The issues and recommendations for every question act as input for the researchers and industrialists for further research. Some issues for further investigation are less coverage of architecture smells, limited ranking formulas, lack of automated evaluation techniques, and so forth.