Intelligent Mining of Association Rules Based on Nanopatterns for Code Smells Detection

Abstract

Software maintenance is an imperative step in software development. Code smells can arise as a result of poor design as well as frequent code changes due to changing needs. Early detection of code smells during software development can help with software maintenance. This work focuses on identifying code smells on Java software using nanopatterns. Nanopatterns are method-level code structures that reflect the presence of code smells. Nanopatterns are extracted using a command-line interface based on the ASM bytecode analysis. Class labels are extracted using three tools, namely inFusion, JDeodorant, and iPlasma. Rules are extracted from nanopatterns using the Apriori algorithm and mapped with the extracted class labels. Best rules are selected using the Border Collie Optimization (BCO) algorithm with the accuracy of the k-NN classifier as the fitness function. The selected rules are stored in the rule base to detect code smells. The objective is to detect a maximum number of code smells with a minimum number of rules. Experiments are carried out on Java software, namely jEdit, Nutch, Lucene, and Rhino. The proposed work detects code smells, namely data class, blob, spaghetti code, functional decomposition, and feature envy, with 98.78% accuracy for jEdit, 97.45% for Nutch, 95.58% for Lucene, and 96.34% for Rhino. The performance of the proposed work is competitive with other well-known methods of detecting code smells.