Design smell
term in computer programming
In computer programming, a design smell is a structure in a design that indicates a violation of fundamental design principles, and which can negatively impact the project's quality. The origin of the term can be traced to the term "code smell" which was featured in the book Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler.
Details
Different authors have defined the word "smell" in different ways:
N. Moha et al.: "Code and design smells are poor solutions to recurring implementation and design problems."
R. C. Martin: "Design smells are the odors of rotting software."
Fowler: "Smells are certain structures in the code that suggest (sometimes they scream for) the possibility of refactoring."
Design smells indicate the accumulated design debt (one of the prominent dimensions of technical debt). Bugs or unimplemented features are not accounted as design smells. Design smells arise from the poor design decisions that make the design fragile and difficult to maintain. It is a good practice to identify design smells in a software system and apply appropriate refactoring to eliminate it to avoid accumulation of technical debt.
The context (characterized by various factors such as the problem at hand, design eco-system, and platform) plays an important role to decide whether a certain structure or decision should be considered as a design smell. Generally, it is appropriate to live with design smells due to constraints imposed by the context. Nevertheless, design smells should be tracked and managed as technical debt because they degrade the overall system quality over time.
Common design smells
Missing abstraction when clumps of data or encoded strings are used instead of creating an abstraction.
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This entry incorporates text from “Design smell” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.