Code smells for multi-language systems

Abstract

Software quality becomes a necessity and no longer an advantage. In fact, with the advancement of technologies, companies must provide software with good quality. Many studies introduce the use of design patterns as improving software quality and discuss the presence of occurrences of design defects as decreasing software quality. Code smells include low-level problems in source code, poor coding decisions that are symptoms of the presence of anti-patterns in the code. Most of the studies present in the literature discuss the occurrences of design defects for mono-language systems. However, nowadays most of the systems are developed using a combination of several programming languages, in order to use particular features of each of them. As the number of languages increases, so does the number of design defects. They generally do not prevent the program from functioning correctly, but they indicate a higher risk of future bugs and makes the code less readable and harder to maintain. We analysed open-source systems, developers' documentation, bug reports, and programming language specifications and extracted bad practices related to multi-language systems. We encoded these practices in the form of code smells. We report in this paper 12 code smells.