Comparison of occurrence of design smells in desktop and mobile applications

Paper in proceeding, 2020

Design smells are symptoms of poor solutions to recurring design problems in a software system. Those symptoms have a direct negative impact on software quality by making it difficult to comprehend and maintain. In this paper we compare the occurrence of design smells between different technological ecosystems: windows/desktop and android/mobile. This knowledge is significant for various software maintenance activities such as program quality assurance and refactoring. To supplement previous findings, our study aimed at (a) understanding if and how the relationship among design smells differs across windows and mobile applications and (b) determining the groups of design smells that tend to occur frequently together and the magnitude of their occurrence in windows and mobile applications. In this study, we explored the use of statistics and unsupervised learning on a dataset consisting of twelve (12) Java-based open-source projects mined from GitHub. We identified fifteen (15) most frequent design smells across desktop and mobile applications. Additionally, a clustering technique revealed which groups of design smells that often co-occur. Specifically, {SpeculativeGenerality, SwissArmyKnife} and {LongParameterList, ClassDataShouldBePrivate} are observed to occur frequently together in desktop and mobile applications.