Introduction to Smells

While the repercussions of smells on code quality have been empirically assessed, there is still only anecdotal evidence on when and why bad smells are introduced. To fill this gap, we conducted a large empirical study over the change history of 200 open source projects from different software ecosystems and investigated when bad smells are introduced by developers, and the circumstances and reasons behind their introduction. Our study required the development of a strategy to identify smell-introducing commits, the mining of over 0.5M commits, and the manual analysis of 9,164 of them (i.e., those identified as smell-introducing). Our findings mostly contradict common wisdom stating that smells are being introduced during evolutionary tasks. In the light of our results, we also call for the need to develop a new generation of recommendation systems aimed at properly planning smell refactoring activities.