Causes, impacts, and detection approaches of code smell: a survey

Code smells are anomalies often generated in design, implementation or maintenance phase of software development life cycle. Researchers established several catalogues characterizing the smells. Fowler and Beck developed the most popular catalogue of 22 smells covering varieties of development issues. This literature presents an overview of the existing research conducted on these 22 smells. Our motivation is to represent these smells with an easier interpretation for the software developers, determine the causes that generate these issues in applications and their impact from different aspects of software maintenance. This paper also highlights previous and recent research on smell detection with an effort to categorize the approaches based on the underlying concept.