In past and recent years, the issues related to managing technical debt received significant
attention by researchers from both industry and academia. There are several factors that …

Technical debt is a metaphor introduced by Cunningham to indicate “not quite right code
which we postpone making it right”. One noticeable symptom of technical debt is …

Different forms of technical debt exist that have to be carefully managed. In this paper we
focus our attention on design debt, represented by code smells. We consider three smells …

Code smells are a popular mechanism to identify structural design problems in software
systems. Since it is generally not feasible to fix all the smells arising in the code, some of …

Code smells are indicators of issues with source code quality that may hinder evolution.
While previous studies mainly focused on the effects of individual code smells on …

Code smells can be used to capture symptoms of code decay and potential maintenance
problems that can be avoided by applying the right refactoring. They can be seen as a …

Empirical studies have shown so far that code smells have relatively low impact over
maintenance effort at file level. We surmise that previous studies have found low effects of …

This work presents the results of an initial empirical study on the subjective evaluation of bad
code smells, which identify poor structures in software. Based on a case study in a Finnish …

In the last decade several catalogues have been defined to characterize bad code smells,
ie, symptoms of poor design and implementation choices. On top of such catalogues …

Code smells represent symptoms of poor implementation choices. Previous studies found
that these smells make source code more difficult to maintain, possibly also increasing its …