Code Smells Analysis Mechanisms, Detection Issues, and Effect on Software Maintainability

Software evolution is an inevitable need in most of the modern businesses, software that doesn’t accommodate changes is hard to survive the market needs. Also, software changes can affect the overall design of the software and sometimes in a corrupting way, affecting the maintainability and evolvability of the software, which introduces technical debt that needs to be solved by continuous refactoring and restructuring of software. Code smells are useful indicators to identify the parts of the code to be refactored to improve the overall maintainability of the software. We present an overview of software code smells, detection and analysis mechanisms and difficulties. Also, we address the effect of refactoring on software maintainability and error-proneness of software.