An Automated Code Smell and Anti-Pattern Detection Approach

Abstract

Today, software maintenance is more expensive than development costs. As class complexity increases, it is increasingly difficult for new programmers to adapt to software projects, causing the cost of the software to go up. Therefore, it's important to produce faultless and understandable code. Moreover, software projects are not developed by one person alone; even a small-scale project needs 3 or more participants working on the code at the same time. Producing well designed code during the development stage has a significant value because this process makes software projects more understandable and leads to higher code quality. Consequently, the cost of software project maintenance will decrease. Code smells and anti-patterns are symptoms of poorly designed code. The aforementioned tendencies of software projects increase the possibility of poor implementations and code imperfections. Therefore it is necessary to detect and refactor poorly designed code. This paper describes an attempt to achieve their detection.