Facilitating software refactoring with appropriate resolution order of bad smells

ABSTRACT Bad smell is a key concept in software refactoring. We have a bunch of bad smells, refactoring rules, and refactoring tools, but we do not know which kind of bad smells should be resolved first. The resolution of one kind of bad smells may have impact on the resolution of other bad smells. Consequently, different resolution orders of the same set of bad smells may require different effort, and/or lead to different quality improvement. In order to ease the work and maximize the effect of refactoring, we try to analyze the relationships among different kinds of bad smells, and their impact on resolution orders of these bad smells. With the analysis, we recommend a resolution order of common bad smells. The main contribution of this paper is to motivate the necessity to arrange resolution orders of bad smells, and recommend a resolution order of common bad smells