When Are Smells Indicators of Architectural Refactoring Opportunities? A Study of 50 Software Projects

This web page contains the replication package for the paper "When Are Smells Key Symptoms of Design Problems? A Study of 50 Software Projects"

This neo4j-community-3.1.0-icpc-2020.zip (omitted due dobule-blind review) file contains data related to the 50 open source projects used in our study. For each project, we collected refactoring operations and code smells for all commits.

Login: neo4j

Password: boil2.eat

The file contains a Neo4j database with 5 types of nodes:

- Project: Nodes like this one contains metadata about the projects considered (name and url, for instance)

- Commit: These notes store data related to commits of each project (date, author, comment, etc.)

- Element: It represents code elements (methods, classes, interfaces, etc.). These nodes store all sort of data related to code elements: fqn, metrics values, file name, location in the code, etc.

- Refactoring: It represents all refactoring operations by type and impact over code smells (if removed or not the smell).

- Smell: All instances of code smells by type and affected code element.

The nodes relates to each other according to the following relationships:

(Commit)-[:BELONGS_TO]->(Project) - Links commits to projects

(Element)-[:COMMITTED_IN]->(Commit) - Links code element to specific commits

(Element)-[:AFFECTED_BY]->(Smell) - Links elements to the smells that affect them

(Refactoring)-[:STARTED_AT]->(Commit) - Commit immediately before refactoring

(Refactoring)-[:CHANGED]->(Element) - Code elements affected by the refactoring, but in the previous state, i.e., before the refactoring actually be performed

(Refactoring)-[:PRODUCED]->(Element) - Code elements in the state after refactoring. It may contain new elements not contained in the :CHANGED relationship because refactorings can also create new elements.

Since this file is a Neo4j database, please refer to these links to interact with the data:

Overview: https://neo4j.com/developer/get-started/

Starting the database and querying data: https://neo4j.com/developer/guide-neo4j-browser/

Cypher Cheat Sheet: https://neo4j.com/docs/cypher-refcard/current/

- The attached file "Selected Projects.pdf" contains additional data about the projects we considered in this research.

- The attached file "Algorithm for Categorization.pdf" contains the pseudo code for the algorithm used to categorize the refactored elements according to the presence of smells