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Code smells are manifestations of design flaws that can degrade code maintainability. So far, no research has investigated if these indicators are useful for conducting system-level maintainability evaluations.

The research in this paper investigates the potential of code smells to reflect system-level indicators of maintainability.

We evaluated four medium-sized Java systems using code smells and compared the results against previous evaluations on the same systems based on expert judgment and the Chidamber and Kemerer suite of metrics. The systems were maintained over a period of up to 4 weeks. During maintenance, effort (person-hours) and number of defects were measured to validate the different evaluation approaches.

Most code smells are strongly influenced by size; consequently code smells are not good indicators for comparing the maintainability of systems differing greatly …