Machine learning based code smell detection through WekaNose

Code smells can be subjectively interpreted, the results provided by detectors are usually different, the agreement in the results is scarce, and a benchmark for the comparison of these results is not yet available. The main approaches used to detect code smells are based on the computation of a set of metrics. However code smell detectors often use different metrics and/or different thresholds, according to their detection rules. As result of this inconsistency the number of detected smells can increase or decrease accordingly, and this makes hard to understand when, for a specific software, a certain characteristic identifies a code smell or not. In this work, we introduce WekaNose, a tool that allows to perform an experiment to study code smell detection through machine learning techniques. The experiment's purpose is to select rules, and/or obtain trained algorithms, that can classify an instance (method or class) as affected or not by a code smell. These rules have the main advantage of being extracted through an example-based approach, rather then a heuristic-based one.