On Investigating Code Smells Correlations

Code smells are characteristics of the software that may indicate a code or design problem that can make software hard to evolve and maintain. Detecting and removing code smells, when necessary, improves the quality and maintainability of a system. Usually detection techniques are based on the computation of a particular set of combined metrics, or standard object-oriented metrics or metrics defined ad hoc for the smell detection. The paper investigates the direct and indirect correlations existing between smells. If one code smell exists, this can imply the existence of another code smell, or if one smell exists, another one cannot be there, or perhaps it could observe that some code smells tend to go together.