TFfinder: A Software tool to discover Temporary Field code smell

Abstract

Code smells may introduce some side effects in the source code and therefore deteriorate the code quality. Martin Fowler has presented a list of 22 code smells, but all these code smells have not been paid good attention for their detection. One such code smell is Temporary field code smell. A publicly available software tool called "Designate Java" has performed a good amount of work in context of code smells. Designate Java is able to detect just 10 code smells. A recently published study has proposed a metric- based approach to detect temporary field smell but as far as we could possibly know, neither this work nor some other tool exists that can identify temporary field code smell. This paper has proposed and developed a software tool called "TFfinder", for automatic detection of temporary field code smell. TFfinder tool has been thoroughly tested on mainstream open source JAVA projects from the GitHub. Examination of results showed that all these projects taken for the investigation experienced Temporary field code smell in fluctuating degrees extending from 3% to 22%. We have likewise forked the "Designate Java" and pushed another branch containing code of the temporary field detection. At long last, we presented this branch to the original repository with the goal that the entire network can be benefitted.