Identifying design problems in the source code: a grounded theory
Abstract
The prevalence of design problems may cause re-engineering or even discontinuation of the system. Due to missing, informal or outdated design documentation, developers often have to rely on the source code to identify design problems. Therefore, developers have to analyze different symptoms that manifest in several code elements, which may quickly turn into a complex task. Although researchers have been investigating techniques to help developers in identifying design problems, there is little knowledge on how developers actually proceed to identify design problems. In order to tackle this problem, we conducted a multi-trial industrial experiment with professionals from 5 software companies to build a grounded theory. The resulting theory offers explanations on how developers identify design problems in practice. For instance, it reveals the characteristics of symptoms that developers consider helpful. Moreover, developers often combine different types of symptoms to identify a single design problem. This knowledge serves as a basis to further understand the phenomena and advance towards more effective identification techniques.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{Sousa-al:ICSE18,
author = {Leonardo da Silva Sousa and
Anderson Oliveira and
Willian Nalepa Oizumi and
Simone D. J. Barbosa and
Alessandro Garcia and
Jaejoon Lee and
Marcos Kalinowski and
Rafael Maiani de Mello and
Baldoino Fonseca and
Roberto Felicio Oliveira and
Carlos Lucena and
Rodrigo B. de Paes},
title = {Identifying design problems in the source code: a grounded theory},
booktitle = {ICSE},
pages = {921--931},
publisher = {{ACM}},
year = {2018},
}