Bad smells -: Humans as code critics

This paper presents the results of an initial empirical study on the subjective evaluation of bad code smells, which identify poor structures in software. Based on a case study in a Finnish software product company, we make two contributions. First, we studied the evaluator effect when subjectively evaluating the existence of smells in code modules. We found that the use of smells for code evaluation purposes is hard due to conflicting perceptions of different evaluators. Second, we applied source code metrics for identifying three smells and compared these results to the subjective evaluations. Surprisingly, the metrics and smell evaluations did not correlate.