Bad smells are sub-optimal code structures that may represent problems needing attention.
We conduct an extensive literature review on bad smells relying on a large body of …

Software smells indicate design or code issues that might degrade the evolution and
maintenance of software systems. Detecting and identifying these issues are challenging …

Code quality metrics are widely used to identify design flaws (eg, code smells) as well as to
act as fitness functions for refactoring recommenders. Both these applications imply a strong …

Given the importance of identifier names and the value of naming conventions to program
comprehension, we speculated in previous work whether a connection exists between the …

High quality method names are critical for the readability and maintainability of programs.
However, constructing concise and consistent method names is often challenging …

Feature location is a program comprehension activity, the goal of which is to identify source
code entities that implement a functionality. Recent feature location techniques apply text …

Recent and past studies have shown that poor source code lexicon negatively affects
software understand ability, maintainability, and, overall, quality. Besides a poor usage of …

Variable names are important to understand and maintain code. If a variable name and the
value stored in the variable do not match, then the program suffers from a name-value …

This paper describes the results of a large (+ 1100 responses) survey of professional
software developers concerning standards for naming source code methods. The various …

Programmer-provided identifier names convey information about the semantics of a
program. This information can complement traditional program analyses in various software …