A Validated Set of Smells in Model-View-Controller Architectures

Mauricio Aniche, Gabriele Bavota, Christoph Treude, Arie van Deursen, Marco Aurélio Gerosa

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceedings/Edited volumeConference contributionScientificpeer-review

25 Citations (Scopus)
188 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Code smells are symptoms of poor design and implementation choices that may hinder code comprehension, and possibly increase change-and defect-proneness. A vast catalogue of smells has been defined in the literature, and it includes smells that can be found in any kind of system (e.g., God Classes), regardless of their architecture. On the other hand, software systems adopting specific architectures (e.g., the Model-View-Controller pattern) can be also affected by other types of poor practices. We surveyed and interviewed 53 MVC developers to collect bad practices to avoid while working on Web MVC applications. Then, we followed an open coding procedure on the collected answers to define a catalogue of six Web MVC smells, namely Brain Repository, Fat Repository, Promiscuous Controller, Brain Controller, Laborious Repository Method, and Meddling Service. Then, we ran a study on 100 MVC projects to assess the impact of these smells on code change-and defect-proneness. In addition, we surveyed 21 developers to verify their perception of the defined smells. The achieved results show that the Web MVC smells (i) more often than not, increase change-and defect-proneness of classes, and (ii) are perceived by developers as severe problems.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings 2016 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, ICSME 2016
Place of PublicationLos Alamitos, CA
PublisherIEEE
Pages233-243
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)978-1-5090-3806-0
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2016
EventICSME 2016: 32nd IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution - Raleigh, United States
Duration: 2 Oct 201610 Oct 2016
Conference number: 32

Conference

ConferenceICSME 2016
Abbreviated titleICSME
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityRaleigh
Period2/10/1610/10/16

Keywords

  • MVC
  • software maintenance
  • code smells
  • model-view-controller

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