Domain matters: bringing further evidence of the relationships among anti-patterns, application domains, and quality-related metrics in Java mobile apps

Some previous work began studying the relationship between application domains and quality, in particular through the prevalence of code and design smells (e.g., anti-patterns). Indeed, it is generally believed that the presence of these smells degrades quality but also that their prevalence varies across domains. Though anecdotal experiences and empirical evidence gathered from developers and researchers support this belief, there is still a need to further deepen our understanding of the relationship between application domains and quality. Consequently, we present a large-scale study that investigated the systematic relationships between the presence of smells and quality-related metrics computed over the bytecode of 1,343 Java Mobile Edition applications in 13 different application domains. Although, we did not find evidence of a correlation between smells and quality- related metrics, we found (1) that larger differences exist between metric values of classes exhibiting smells and classes without smells and (2) that some smells are commonly present in all the domains while others are most prevalent in certain domains