JSpIRIT: a flexible tool for the analysis of code smells

Code smells are a popular mechanism to identify structural design problems in software systems. Since it is generally not feasible to fix all the smells arising in the code, some of them are often postponed by developers to be resolved in the future. One reason for this decision is that the improvement of the code structure, to achieve modifability goals, requires extra effort from developers. Therefore, they might not always spend this additional effort, particularly when they are focused on delivering customer-visible features. This postponement of code smells are seen as a source of technical debt. Furthermore, not all the code smells may be urgent to fix in the context of the system´s modifability and business goals. While there are a number of tools to detect smells, they do not allow developers to discover the most urgent smells according to their goals. In this article, we present a fexible tool to prioritize technical debt in the form of code smells. The tool is flexible to allow developer s to add new smell detection strategies and to prioritize smells, and groups of smells, based on the confguration of their manifold criteria. To illustrate this flexibility, we present an application example of our tool. The results suggest that our tool can be easily extended to be aligned with the developer´s goals.