The Rise of Android Code Smells: Who is to Blame?

Abstract

The rise of mobile apps as new software systems led to the emergence of new development requirements regarding performance. Development practices that do not respect these requirements can seriously hinder app performances and impair user experience, they qualify as code smells. Mobile code smells are generally associated with inexperienced developers who lack knowledge about the framework guidelines. However, this assumption remains unverified and there is no evidence about the role played by developers in the accrual of mobile code smells. In this paper, we therefore study the contributions of developers related to Android code smells. To support this study, we propose SNIFFER, an open-source toolkit that mines Git repositories to extract developers' contributions as code smell histories. Using SNIFFER, we analysed 255k commits from the change history of 324 Android apps. We found that the ownership of code smells is spread across developers regardless of their seniority. There are no distinct groups of code smell introducers and removers. Developers who introduce and remove code smells are mostly the same.

Android Code Smells: From Introduction to Refactoring

“…Awareness of code smells. Previous studies suggested that the accrual of mobile code smells and the indifference of developers toward it are signs of unawareness [15,17]. However, the inputs collected from developers in RQ 4 challenge this hypothesis.…”

“…To perform this study, we relied on the artifacts that we built in our previous works about mobile code smells. In particular, we leveraged the dataset of code smell history [15,17] to collect the necessary data for this study. Then, we followed different approaches to analyse this data and answer our research questions.…”

“…Research works also proposed automated solutions for detecting mobile code smells, like Paprika and aDoctor [21,36]. On the empirical side, our previous studies assessed the key role played by developers in the accrual of mobile code smells [13,15] and quantified their survival in the change history. This allowed us to build an initial understanding of what are mobile code smells and how do they hinder app quality.…”

“…Lack of release analysis. Some studies [15,17] leveraged the change history of mobile apps to better understand code smells. Specifically, our previous work [17] evaluated the impact of releases on code smell survival.…”

“…To answer these questions, we build on the artifacts of our previous works [15,17] to perform an empirical study where we leverage both quantitative and qualitative analyses to inspect introductions and removals of 8 types of Android code smells. Specifically, we analyse the evolution of 180k code smell instances to answer RQ 1 and RQ 2.…”