Merging Smell Detectors: Evidence on the Agreement of Multiple Tools

Abstract

Technical Debt estimation relies heavily on the use of static anal-ysis tools looking for violations of pre-defined rules. Largely, Technical Debt principal is attributed to the presence of low-level code smells, unavoidably tying the effort for fixing the problems with mere coding inefficiencies. At the same time, despite their simple definition, the detection of most code smells is non-trivial and subjective, rendering the assessment of Technical Debt prin-cipal dubious. To this end, we have revisited the literature on code smell detection approaches backed by tools and developed an Eclipse plugin that incorporates six code smell detection ap-proaches. The combined application of various smell detectors can increase the certainty of identifying actual code smells that matter to the development team. We also conduct a case study to investigate the agreement among the employed code smell detec-tors. To our surprise the level of agreement is quite low even for relatively simple code smells, threating the validity of existing TD analysis tools and calling for increased attention to the precise specification of code and design level issues. Source code: https://github.com/apostolisich/SmellDetectorMerger