From: PEM moderator
To: Multiple recipients of list PEM <>
Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2002 08:02:11 +0200
Subject: PEM | 17.10.02 | C.001

Precedence: bulk
X-url: http://www.cwi.nl/~pem

Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain

   Hi,

   This announcement can be found at <http://www.cwi.nl/~pem>

          jCosmo: Java Quality Assurance by Detecting Code Smells

   Date:    17.10.02
   Time:    10:00
   Venue:   C.001
   Speaker: Leon Moonen
   Title:   jCosmo: Java Quality Assurance by Detecting Code Smells

   [Joint work with Eva van Emden]

   Software  inspection  is  a  known  technique  for  improving software
   quality. It involves carefully examining the code, the design, and the
   documentation  of  software  and  checking  these for aspects that are
   known to be potentially problematic based on past experience.

   Code  smells  are  a  metaphor to describe patterns that are generally
   associated  with bad design and bad programming practices. Originally,
   code smells are used to find the places in software that could benefit
   from refactoring. In this talk, we investigate how the quality of code
   can  be  automatically  assessed  by checking for the presence of code
   smells  and  how  this  approach  can  contribute  to  automatic  code
   inspection.

   In  [1],  we  present  an  approach  for  the  automatic detection and
   visualization of code smells and discuss how this approach can be used
   in  the  design  of  a  software  inspection  tool.  We illustrate the
   feasibility  of  our  approach  with  the  development  of  jCosmo,  a
   prototype  code  smell browser that detects and visualizes code smells
   in Java source code [2].

   The  source model extraction component of jCosmo was implemented using
   the   ASF+SDF   Meta-Environment,  the  extracted  source  models  are
   visualized   using   the  Rigi  program  visualization  tool.  Several
   visualizations  have  been developed that show these smells at various
   levels  of  abstraction.  The smell display is intended to help assess
   the  system's quality and support refactoring by providing a quick and
   intuitive  overview of which parts of the system need refactoring. The
   code smells that are currently implemented are concerned with 'switch'
   statements, 'instanceof' statements, and type casts. New smells can be
   added  by  plugging  additional  modules  into  the  extractor  and by
   extending the visualization scripts.

   References:

   [1] Eva van Emden and Leon Moonen. Java quality assurance by detecting
   code  smells.  In Proceedings of the 9th working Conference on Reverse
   Engineering.    IEEE    Computer    Society   Press,   October   2002.
   http://www.cwi.nl/~leon/papers/wcre2002/

   [2] jCosmo homepage: http://www.cwi.nl/projects/renovate/javaQA/

   Have a nice day.
     _________________________________________________________________

   The  programming environment meetings are a forum for the presentation
   and  discussion  of  new  ideas,  ongoing and finished work. A typical
   meeting  addresses  a subject in the area of programming environments,
   program  generation, algebraic specification, term rewriting, parsing,
   etc.  A presentation ideally takes between 45 and 90 minutes. Meetings
   taking  longer  than 45 minutes are interrupted by a coffeebreak. Most
   Thursdays,  a  meeting is held which starts at 10:00 am. in one of the
   rooms at CWI/WINS. Exceptionally, dates or times may change.

   The    program    of    the    meetings    is    available   on   WWW:
   http://www.cwi.nl/~pem
     _________________________________________________________________