DECOR: Detection of Design Defects

Description
Related Papers
Links
Installation
Usage
Material
Acknowledgments
Results

Different Systems
Eclipse v3.2.1
Xerces v2.7.0

Description

DECOR is a tool that allows the specification and the detection of defects such as code smells and antipatterns using a unified vocabulary and a dedicated language. Ptidej is the front-end to the tool suite for evaluating and improving the quality of object-oriented programs, reverse-engineering object-oriented programs (AOL, C/C++, Java), and promoting patterns. Ptidej integrates DECOR as well as visualisations algorithms to ease the understanding of detected defects.

Related Papers

Naouel Moha, Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc, Anne-Françoise Le Meur, and Laurence Duchien. A Domain Analysis to Specify Design Defects and Generate Detection Algorithms. In José Fiadeiro and Paola Inverardi, editors. Proceedings of the 11^th International Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering, pp. 276-291, March-April 2008, LNCS, Springer-Verlag.

Naouel Moha and Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc. Ptidej and DECOR: Identification of Design Patterns and Design Defects. 21^st International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications, October 2007. The OOPSLA'07 demo. presentation of Ptidej and DECOR, including a video on the identification of design patterns and defects.

Naouel Moha, Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc, Pierre Leduc. Automatic Generation of Detection Algorithms for Design Defects. Proceedings of the 21^st IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2006), pp. 297-300, September 18-22, 2006, Tokyo, Japan.

Installation

DECOR is a module of the tool suite Ptidej
Download Ptidej : Note that we do not make the tool directly available because of licensing issues. Thus, you need to have a CVS access from http://ptidej.dyndns.org/material/inanutshell to get the tool.

Usage

You must first select the root of the project package. Only class files (bytecode files) are necessary for the project analysis.
Then select the defect(s) to be detected from the design defect list.
You can visualise this video to see how to use the tool.

Material

BNF grammar
Examples of detection rules for the following defects: Blob, Functional Decomposition, Spaghetti Code, Swiss Army Knife.
Textual Description of Spaghetti Code

Acknowledgments

We contacted developers involved in each of the systems of the validation to compute the precisions and recalls of the results, and to improve our specifications of the design defects. So far, we have received few answers but enthusiastic interest. Software engineers analysed inde- pendently our results for Log4J, Lucene, PMD, and QuickUML, and con¯rmed the results in Table IV. We thank M. Adamovic, C. Alphonce, D. Cutting, T. Copeland, P. Gardner, E. Ross, and Y. Shapira for their kind help.

Results of the Detection

Detection Results in several systems

Results in Eclipse v3.1.2

Recall in Xerces v2.7.0

Examples of Detected Design Defects in Xerces v2.7.0
Design Defect Name	Suspicious Class	LOC, Name of the long method
Spaghetti Code
	org.apache.xerces.impl.xs.models.XSDFACM	426 LOC, buildDFA(CMNode)
	org.apache.xerces.dom.DOMNormalizer	946 LOC, normalizeNode(Node)
	org.apache.xerces.impl.xs.traversers.XSAttributeChecker	862 LOC, validate(Object, String, String, int, XSDocumentInfo)
	org.apache.xerces.util.URI	285 LOC, initializePath(String, int)
	org.apache.xerces.impl.XMLScanner	486 LOC, scanAttributeValue(XMLString, XMLString, String, boolean, String)
Design Defect Name	Suspicious Class	Number of methods and attributes declared, Data classes
Blob
	org.apache.xerces.jaxp.datatype.XMLGregorianCalendarImpl	127 javax.xml.datatype.DatatypeConstants javax.xml.namespace.QName
	org.apache.xerces.parsers.XML11DTDConfiguration	95 org.apache.xerces.xni.parser.XMLInputSource org.apache.xerces.impl.dv.DTDDVFactory org.apache.xerces.impl.validation.ValidationManager
	org.apache.xerces.impl.dtd.DTDGrammar	184 org.apache.xerces.impl.dtd.XMLDTDDescription org.apache.xerces.xni.XMLString org.apache.xerces.impl.dtd.XMLContentSpec org.apache.xerces.xni.QName
	org.apache.xerces.xinclude.XIncludeHandler	222 org.apache.xerces.util.SecurityManager org.apache.xerces.xni.XMLString org.apache.xerces.util.XMLSymbols org.apache.xerces.util.HTTPInputSource
	org.apache.xerces.dom.DOMNormalizer	92 org.apache.xerces.impl.dtd.XMLDTDDescription org.apache.xerces.xni.XMLString org.apache.xerces.util.XMLSymbols org.apache.xerces.xni.QName
Design Defect Name	Suspicious Class	Keywords
Functional Decomposition
	org.apache.xerces.impl.xs.models.CMNodeFactory	end, handle, traverse, copy, init, reset, modify, check, prepare, create, parse, validate, start, configure, process, report
	org.apache.xerces.util.ParserConfigurationSettings	idem
	org.apache.xerces.impl.dv.xs.TimeDV	idem
	org.apache.xerces.impl.xs.identity.XPathMatcher	idem
	org.apache.xerces.impl.xs.traversers.XSAttributeChecker	idem
Design Defect Name	Suspicious Class	Multiple Interfaces
Swiss Army Knife
	org.apache.xerces.dom.NodeImpl	org.w3c.dom.Node org.w3c.dom.events.EventTarget org.w3c.dom.NodeList
	org.apache.xerces.jaxp.validation.ValidatorHandlerImpl	org.apache.xerces.xs.PSVIProvider org.apache.xerces.impl.validation.EntityState org.xml.sax.DTDHandler org.apache.xerces.jaxp.validation.ValidatorHelper org.apache.xerces.xni.XMLDocumentHandler
	org.xml.sax.helpers.XMLFilterImpl	org.xml.sax.ContentHandler org.xml.sax.ErrorHandler org.xml.sax.XMLFilter org.xml.sax.EntityResolver org.xml.sax.DTDHandler
	org.xml.sax.HandlerBase	org.xml.sax.ErrorHandler org.xml.sax.DTDHandler org.xml.sax.EntityResolver org.xml.sax.DocumentHandler
	org.apache.xml.serialize.BaseMarkupSerializer	org.xml.sax.DocumentHandler org.xml.sax.DTDHandler org.xml.sax.ext.LexicalHandler org.apache.xml.serialize.Serializer org.xml.sax.ContentHandler org.apache.xml.serialize.DOMSerializer org.xml.sax.ext.DeclHandler