A Principle-based Classification of Structural Design Smells

We would like to share a presentation that describes our principle-based classification of structural design smell. We believe that all structural design smells can be classified using famous four principles of object-orientation i.e. Abstraction, Encapsulation, Modularization, and Hierarchy.

Principle based classification of design smells from Ganesh SG

Design smells poster for quick reference

This poster provides a quick overview of the design smells. The smells are classified as the violation of fundamental OO principles - abstraction, encapsulation, modularization, and hierarchy. 

Take a printout and paste it in your cubicle for your quick reference!

Design smell poster from Ganesh SG

Design Smells: Overview, Classification, and Examples

Here is a presentation on design smells that talks about the need for understanding design smells in OO software systems, offers a classification based on our paper, and presents a few design smell examples. The presentation cites examples from well-known classes of JDK so that reader can relate to the provided description with much more ease. 

Have a comment, feedback, or suggestions? Please do feel free to write us. Also you are welcome to post your own examples for these design smells :-)

Our paper on Design Smells published in JOT (June 2013 issue)

Title: Towards a Principle-based Classification of Structural Design Smells

Abstract: Fred Brooks in his book "The Mythical Man Month" describes how the inherent properties of software (i.e. complexity, conformity, changeability, and invisibility) make its design an "essential" difficulty. Good design practices are fundamental requisites to address this difficulty. One such good practice is that a software designer should be aware of and address "design smells" that can manifest as a result of his design decisions. However, our study of the vast literature on object-oriented design smells reveals the lack of an effective organization of smells that could better guide a designer in understanding and addressing potential issues in his design. In order to address this gap, we have adopted a novel approach to classify and catalog a number of recurring structural design smells based on how they violate key object oriented (OO) design principles. To evaluate the usefulness of our design smell catalog, we first asked Siemens CT DC AA architects to use it to identify design smells in their projects, and later elicited feedback from them about their experience. The feedback received indicates that these architects found the catalog to be very useful. In this paper, we present our catalog, classification, and naming scheme for design smells and also highlight several interesting observations and insights that result from our work.

Cite as: S.G. Ganesh, Tushar Sharma, Girish Suryanarayana, “Towards a Principle-based Classification of Structural Design Smells”, Journal of Object Technology, Volume 12, no. 2 (June 2013), pp. 1:1-29, doi:10.5381/jot.2013.12.2.a1.

View/Download the paper

If you are interested to see the information discussed in the above paper in the form of a presentation, it could be downloaded from here.

A nice poster on design smell classification can be downloaded from here.