Code smells are symptoms of poor design solutions applied by programmers during the development of software systems. While the research community devoted a lot of effort to studying and devising approaches for detecting the traditional code smells defined by Fowler, little knowledge and support is available for an emerging category of Mobile app code smells. Recently, Reimann et al. proposed a new catalogue of Android- specific code smells that may be a threat for the maintainability and the efficiency of Android applications. However, current tools working in the context of Mobile apps provide limited support and, more importantly, are not available for developers interested in monitoring the quality of their apps. To overcome these limitations, we propose a fully automated tool, coined aDoctor, able to identify 15 Android-specific code smells from the catalogue by Reimann et al. An empirical study conducted on the source code of 18 Android applications reveals that the proposed tool reaches, on average, 98% of precision and 98% of recall. We made aDoctor publicly available.

1. Lightweight Detection of
Android-specific Code Smells:
the aDoctor Project
Andrea De LuciaAnnibale Panichella
Dario Di NucciFabio Palomba
Andy Zaidman

2. Bad Smells have been defined as symptoms of poor
design or implementation choices.

3. Bad Smells hinder code
comprehensibility
[Abbes et al. CSMR 2011]

4. [Khomh et al. EMSE 2012]
Bad Smells increase
change and fault proneness

5. Number of smartphone users worldwide from 2014 to 2020
(in billions)
The statistics portal association.

6. Android-specific Code Smells
A set of bad programming practices of
Android developers.
Involve non-functional attributes of mobile apps.
Reimann et al. A tool-supported quality smell catalogue for android developers.
2014. Modellierung 2014.
Security
Source Code
Quality
Performance
Data Integrity

7. An example: Data Transmission Without Compression
File sending without compression.

8. aDoctor
AnDrOid Code smell detecTOR
https://github.com/fpalomba/aDoctor

9. aDoctor
AnDrOid Code smell detecTOR
15 Android Specific Code Smells
Executable via Terminal or GUI.
Data Export in CSV.
Released under MIT License.

11. Evaluation
What are the precision and recall scores
of aDoctor in detecting Android-specific code
smells?
18apps
RQ
2 Students Manually
Validated 1,927 Instances
98% of F-Measure
98% of Precision
98% of Recall
100% of F-Measure
on 13 smells

12. Future Works
Integrate aDoctor in
Android Studio

13. Future Works
Extract and Automate
Refactorings
Integrate aDoctor in
Android Studio

14. Dario Di Nucci
University of Salerno
ddinucci@unisa.it
http://www.sesa.unisa.it/people/ddinucci/
Thanks for your attention!
https://github.com/fpalomba/aDoctor