Android-specific Code Smells; Detection Tool; Empirical Study
Abstract :
[en] Code smells are symptoms of poor design solutions applied by programmers during the development of software systems. While the research community devoted a lot of effort to studying and devising approaches for detecting the traditional code smells defined by Fowler, little knowledge and support is available for an emerging category of Mobile app code smells. Recently, Reimann etal proposed a new catalogue of Android-specific code smells that may be a threat for the maintainability and the efficiency of Android applications. However, current tools working in the context of Mobile apps provide limited support and, more importantly, are not available for developers interested in monitoring the quality of their apps. To overcome these limitations, we propose a fully automated tool, coined aDoctor, able to identify 15 Android-specific code smells from the catalogue by Reimann et al. An empirical study conducted on the source code of 18 Android applications reveals that the proposed tool reaches, on average, 98% of precision and 98% of recall. We made aDoctor publicly available.
Disciplines :
Computer science
Author, co-author :
Palomba, Fabio; University of Salerno > Computer Science
Di Nucci, Dario; University of Salerno > Computer Science
PANICHELLA, Annibale ; University of Luxembourg > Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SNT)
Zaidman, Andy; Delft University of Technology > EWI
De Lucia, Andre; University of Salerno > Computer Science
External co-authors :
yes
Language :
English
Title :
Lightweight Detection of Android-specific Code Smells: the aDoctor Project
Publication date :
21 February 2017
Event name :
International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering
Event date :
from 21-02-2017 to 24-02-2016
Audience :
International
Main work title :
Proceedings of the 24th IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering (SANER 2017)
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