International Conference on Computer and Knowledge Engineering

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Experimental evaluation and comparison of anti-pattern detection tools by the gold standard

Authors :

Somayeh Kalhor¹ Mohammad reza Keyvanpour² Afshin Salajegheh³

1- Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Islamic Azad University, South Tehran Branch 2- Department of Computer Engineering, Alzahra University Tehran, Iran 3- Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Islamic Azad University, South Tehran Branch

Keywords :

anti-pattern،bad smell،anti-pattern detection

Abstract :

Each symptom in a software system's source code or design that violates object-oriented principles such as maintainability, reusability, and integrity is called anti-pattern. Poor design or programming in the software development process can lead to anti-patterns that may cause further problems in software maintenance, so they should be removed by refactoring. The first and most crucial step in software refactoring is anti-pattern detection. Different approaches and tools have been proposed to do this, which provide different results in the same program due to the informal definition of anti-patterns. In this paper, four anti-pattern detection tools have been compared, namely Checkstyle, PMD, iPlasma, and Jspirit. These tools are implemented on the open-source software systems that have been presented as a gold standard in previous studies in this field. The detection results of three anti-patterns are compared: Large Class, Long Method, and Feature Envy. By comparing tools output and the gold standard, we are sure our calculated precision and recall values are correct.