Android Code Smells: From Introduction to Refactoring
This addresses the problem of understanding and managing mobile-specific code smells for Android developers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing research in software engineering.
The study investigated the introduction, evolution, and removal of Android-specific code smells across 324 apps, finding that their high prevalence is not due to release pressure and that developers rarely refactor them intentionally, even when aware.
Object-oriented code smells are well-known concepts in software engineering that refer to bad design and development practices commonly observed in software systems. With the emergence of mobile apps, new classes of code smells have been identified by the research community as mobile-specific code smells. These code smells are presented as symptoms of important performance issues or bottlenecks. Despite the multiple empirical studies about these new code smells, their diffuseness and evolution along change histories remains unclear. We present in this article a large-scale empirical study that inspects the introduction, evolution, and removal of Android code smells. This study relies on data extracted from 324 apps, a manual analysis of 561 smell-removing commits, and discussions with 25 Android developers. Our findings reveal that the high diffuseness of mobile-specific code smells is not a result of releasing pressure. We also found that the removal of these code smells is generally a side effect of maintenance activities as developers do not refactor smell instances even when they are aware of them.