Anti-patterns for multi-language systems

Abidi, Mouna; Khomh, Foutse; Guéhéneuc, Yann‐Gaël

doi:10.1145/3361149.3364227

Cited by 21 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…In 2019, Abidi et al identified six anti-patterns [15] and twelve code smells [16] in MPL software systems. Six antipatterns were identified in OSS systems, including excessive inter-language communication, too much scattering, and so forth [15]. Twelve code smells were proposed, including passing excessive objects, memory management mismatch, and so on [16].…”

Section: B Quality Of Mpl Software Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multi-Programming-Language Commits in OSS: An Empirical Study on Apache Projects

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Modern software systems, such as Spark, are usually written in multiple programming languages (PLs). Besides benefiting from code reuse, such systems can also take advantages of specific PLs to implement certain features, to meet various quality needs, and to improve development efficiency. In this context, a change to such systems may need to modify source files written in different PLs. We define a multi-programminglanguage commit (MPLC) in a version control system (e.g., Git) as a commit that involves modified source files written in two or more PLs. To our knowledge, the phenomenon of MPLCs in software development has not been explored yet. In light of the potential impact of MPLCs on development difficulty and software quality, we performed an empirical study to understand the state of MPLCs, their change complexity, as well as their impact on open time of issues and bug proneness of source files in real-life software projects. By exploring the MPLCs in 20 nontrivial Apache projects with 205,994 commits, we obtained the following findings: (1) 9% of the commits from all the projects are MPLCs, and the proportion of MPLCs in 80% of the projects goes to a relatively stable level; (2) more than 90% of the MPLCs from all the projects involve source files written in two PLs; (3) the change complexity of MPLCs is significantly higher than that of non-MPLCs in all projects; (4) issues fixed in MPLCs take significantly longer to be resolved than issues fixed in non-MPLCs in 80% of the projects; and (5) source files that have been modified in MPLCs tend to be more bug-prone than source files that have never been modified in MPLCs. These findings provide practitioners with useful insights on the architecture design and quality management of software systems written in multiple PLs.

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Section: B Quality Of Mpl Software Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multi-Programming-Language Commits in OSS: An Empirical Study on Apache Projects

et al. 2021

Preprint

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“…In a multi-language context, design smells are defined as poor design and coding decisions when bridging between different programming languages. They may slow down the development process of multi-language systems or increase the risk of bugs or potential failures in the future [12,13].…”

Section: Multi-language Design Smellsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our study is based on the recently published catalog of multi-language design smells [12,13]. The catalog was derived from an empirical study that mined the literature, developers' documentation, and bug reports.…”

Section: Multi-language Design Smellsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The catalog was derived from an empirical study that mined the literature, developers' documentation, and bug reports. This catalog was validated by the pattern community and also by surveying professional developers [11][12][13]. Some of those design smells could also apply to the context of mono-language systems, however, in this study we focus only on the analysis of JNI systems.…”

Section: Multi-language Design Smellsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We focus on the analysis of JNI systems because they are commonly used by developers and also introduce several challenges [6,10,11]. Our analysis is based on a previously published catalog comprising of anti-patterns and code smells related to multi-language systems [12,13]. In this paper, we aim to investigate the evolution of multi-language design smells and the relations between these smells and software fault-proneness.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Are Multi-language Design Smells Fault-prone? An Empirical Study

Abidi¹,

Rahman²,

Openja³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Nowadays, modern applications are developed using components written in different programming languages and technologies. The cost benefits of reuse and the advantages of each programming language are two main incentives behind the proliferation of such systems. However, as the number of languages increases, so does the challenges related to the development and maintenance of these systems. In such situations, developers may introduce design smells (i.e., anti-patterns and code smells) which are symptoms of poor design and implementation choices. Design smells are defined as poor design and coding choices that can negatively impact the quality of a software program despite satisfying functional requirements. Studies on mono-language systems suggest that the presence of design smells may indicate a higher risk of future bugs and affects code comprehension, thus making systems harder to maintain. However, the impact of multi-language design smells on software quality such as fault-proneness is yet to be investigated.In this paper, we present an approach to detect multi-language design smells in the context of JNI systems. We then investigate the prevalence of those design smells and their impacts on fault-proneness. Specifically, we detect 15 design smells in 98 releases of nine open source JNI projects. Our results show that the design smells are prevalent in the selected projects and persist throughout the releases of the systems. We observe that in the analyzed systems, 33.95% of the files involving communications between Java and C/C++ contain occurrences of multi-language design smells. Some kinds of smells are more prevalent than others, e.g., Unused Parameters, Too Much Scattering, Unused Method Declaration. Our results suggest that files with multi-language design smells can often be more associated with bugs than files without these smells, and that specific smells are more correlated to fault-proneness than others. From analyzing fault-inducing commit messages, we also extracted activities that are more likely to introduce bugs in smelly files. We believe that our findings are important for practitioners as it can help them prioritize design smells during the maintenance of multi-language systems. CCS Concepts: • Software and its engineering → Software quality.

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