ARCS 2013 - 2013 International Workshop on Aligning Research on Code Smells

Code smells are a metaphor for issues with source code that negatively affect software comprehensibility and maintainability. As such, code smells can help to monitor the health of a system throughout its evolution, and to guide efforts to sustain comprehensibility and maintainability. Much effort by researchers and tool vendors has focused on the detection of code smells. Recently, studies have started to investigate the impact of smells on software maintenance and evolution. However, there is a long road to go before code smell analysis can drive exactly those changes that improve comprehensibility and maintainability of a given system. We have identified four challenges that need to be addressed:
Lack of a common vocabulary to build a consistent knowledge base,
Lack of an ontological framework to compare/synthesize results across studies,
Lack of an evaluation framework to compare/evaluate the quality of detection approaches, and
Lack of an agenda to make the knowledge/tools accessible in industrial contexts.
The ARCS workshop aims at establishing a shared roadmap to address these challenges and better align ongoing efforts in code smell research.