Defining and Detecting Bad Smells of Aspect-Oriented Software

Bad smells are software patterns that are generally associated with bad design and bad programming. They can be removed by using the refactoring technique which improves the quality of software. Aspect-oriented (AO) software development, which involves new notions and the different ways of thinking for developing software and solving the crosscutting problem, possibly introduces different kinds of design flaws. Defining bad smells hidden in AO software in order to point out bad design and bad programming is then necessary. This paper proposes the definition of new AO bad smells. Moreover, appropriate existing AO refactoring methods for eliminating each bad smell are presented. The proposed bad smells are validated. The results show that after removing the bad smells by using appropriate refactoring methods, the software quality is increased.