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Presenter: Eva van Emden - University of Victoria, Canada
Supervisor:

Date: Fri, March 28, 2003
Time: 13:30:00 - 00:00:00
Place: EOW 430

ABSTRACT

Code inspection is an effective way to improve software quality. Unfortunately, the high cost in time and labour of code inspection is a deterrent to effective inspection. Providing support for automated code inspection can help maintain good code quality during development by reducing the cost of inspection. Code smells are a metaphor for describing the negative patterns in code. Although code smells are not errors or bugs in themselves, they indicate areas of the code that may be improved by refactoring. Although code smells originated as a way of determining where to apply refactoring, here we explore how their presence in code can be used as a quality metric. We present an approach for automated code inspection by detecting and visualizing code smells. This approach has been implemented in a prototype tool, jCosmo, that extracts and displays code smell information for Java programs. Finally we describe how this tool was applied in a case study.