Does Code Smell Frequency Have a Relationship with Fault-proneness?

Abstract

Fault-proneness is an indication of programming errors that decreases software quality and maintainability. On the contrary, code smell is a symptom of potential design problems which has impact on fault-proneness. In the literature, negative impact of code smells on fault-proneness has been investigated. However, it is still unclear that how frequency of each code smell type impacts the fault-proneness. To mitigate this research gap, we present an empirical study to identify whether frequency of individual code smell types has a relationship with the fault-proneness. The results show that Anti Singleton, Blob and Class Data Should Be Private smell types have strong relationship with fault-proneness though their frequencies are not very high. On the other hand, comparatively high frequent code smell types such as Complex Class, Large Class and Long Parameter List have moderate relationship with fault-proneness. These findings will assist developers to prioritize and refactor code smells to improve software quality.