Exploring the Connection between Design Smells and Security Vulnerabilities

Abstract

Software quality aims at having quality as part of all aspects of the developed software. Design smells are considered enemies of the software source code quality. There are verities of design problems with different terminologies. Researchers and practitioners accept it as true that whenever there is a design smell, there is a security issue or concern. In this work, we want to explore the connection between design smells and security vulnerabilities. This work provides experimental evidence about this connection. We conducted an empirical study to explore the connection between design smells and security issues by evaluating four C# open-source systems. We found interesting results that show classes with design smells have more chances of having security issues.