Smell detection for eclipse

ABSTRACT

Smells are architectural, rather than functional, flaws in software that tend to reduce maintainability, extensibility, modularity, testability, or other software quality measures. Common smells include overly-long method bodies, message chains, parallel inheritance, use of switch statements to implement polymorphic behavior, data clumps, overly specific variable types, and duplicated code. Code duplication in particular is a well-known source of maintenance problems. Because smells do not represent functional flaws, they can be remediated by behavior-preserving transformations (i.e. refactorings).

We will demonstrate a nascent extensible smell detection framework for Java, implemented for the Eclipse IDE (www.eclipse.org). Our framework provides a simple Eclipse extension point for defining smell detectors, along with several basic smell detectors, including a reasonably efficient code duplication detector. Several of our smell detectors feature Eclipse quick-fix refactorings to automatically remediate smells upon the user's request. This transforms the tool from a mere problem indicator into a tool that actively assists developers in improving their code. We believe that such a facility has significant potential in educational settings, in directing a student's attention to software engineering principles while coding.

Our demonstration will consist of two parts. First, we'll demonstrate some of our smell detectors on realistic source code bases (including Eclipse itself), along with their corresponding quick-fix support. Second, we'll walk through the implementation of a very simple smell detector within our framework, along with a very simple remediation.

REFERENCES

• 1: Refactoring: improving the design of existing code, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1999

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.1 PROGRAMMING TECHNIQUES
      D.1.5 Object-oriented Programming

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.3 Coding Tools and Techniques
      D.2.6 Programming Environments

General Terms:
Design

Keywords:
code smells, refactoring, software engineering, software quality