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Towards Automated Design Smell Detection

Authors:
Stefan Burger
Oliver Hummel

Keywords: Design Patterns, Pattern Recommendation, Stra- tegy, Code Quality

Abstract:
Patterns are widely seen as an important ingredient to improve structure and maintainability of object-oriented software designs. In order to fully recognize opportunities for them, however, developers usually need a lot of experience as well as a good understanding of a given system. Hence, they often miss possibilities to use design patterns and produce code containing “design smells”. With a view to overcome this un- satisfying situation, we have derived predicates that allow automatically identifying those locations in software systems where the Strategy design pattern would be beneficial. Moreo- ver, we have implemented a prototypical tool that is able to apply these predicates. Using it on eight open-source projects with roughly 850K lines of code as an explorative study has discovered a variety of places where the pattern would im- prove the design. As ongoing work has demonstrated that this approach is transferable to other patterns, we believe that it has a good potential to increase the use of design patterns and therewith code quality in the not too distant future.

Pages: 428 to 433

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2014

Publication date: October 12, 2014

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4235

ISBN: 978-1-61208-367-4

Location: Nice, France

Dates: from October 12, 2014 to October 16, 2014