Are Smell-Based Metrics Actually Useful in Effort-Aware Structural Change-Proneness Prediction? An Empirical Study

Bad code smells (also named as code smells) are symptoms of poor design choices in implementation. Existing studies empirically confirmed that the presence of code smells increases the likelihood of subsequent changes (i.e., change-proness). However, to the best of our knowledge, no prior studies have leveraged smell-based metrics to predict particular change type (i.e., structural changes). Moreover, when evaluating the effectiveness of smell-based metrics in structural change-proneness prediction, none of existing studies take into account of the effort inspecting those change-prone source code. In this paper, we consider five smell-based metrics for effort-aware structural change-proneness prediction and compare these metrics with a baseline of well-known CK metrics in predicting particular categories of change types. Specifically, we first employ univariate logistic regression to analyze the correlation between each smell-based metric and structural change-proneness. Then, we build multivariate prediction models to examine the effectiveness of smell-based metrics in effort-aware structural change-proneness prediction when used alone and used together with the baseline metrics, respectively. Our experiments are conducted on six Java open-source projects with up to 60 versions and results indicate that: (1) all smell-based metrics are significantly related to structural change-proneness, except metric ANOS in hive and SCM in camel after removing confounding effect of file size; (2) in most cases, smell-based metrics outperform the baseline metrics in predicting structural change-proneness; and (3) when used together with the baseline metrics, the smell-based metrics are more effective to predict change-prone files with being aware of inspection effort.