Code Smell Prioritization with Business Process Mining and Static Code Analysis: A Case Study

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Because particular elements are often used, maintaining their functionality is critical. Identifying and resolving code smells in frequently used and rapidly changing areas should take precedence over other code smells. By merging business logic, heat map information, and commit history analysis, a novel technique for locating frequently utilised and change-prone locations in a codebase is provided in this study. It examines Java applications' codebases, commits, and log files for business processes, heat map graphs, and severity levels of various types of code smells, as well as commit history, in order to present a comprehensive, efficient, and resource-friendly technique for identifying and prioritising performance throttling and code maintenance concerns.

Authors has been revised the paper as per reviewer comments, properly.

The version is good in this form, however the majority of the most recent references are missing.

The English in the article is poor, and numerous sentences are excessively long.

With some revisions, this manuscript can be accepted.

 

 

Author Response

Thank you very much for the review. According to your suggestion, we have added three recent references in the related work section. We hope this will make the paper proposition stronger.

To improve the quality of our writing, we have taken multiple steps. Such as grammar checking with a native English writer, breaking excessive sentences into multiple simple sentences, using simple synonyms for difficult words, etc.

We hope this will improve the paper’s readability.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

1. The study has clear objectives. 

2. The proposed approach is interesting and show remarkable results. 

3. The overall paper structure is good except that the paper is quite long. The  author tends to describe each phase of the approach  in a detail way. 

4.The overall evaluation of the paper need to be further improved. At the current stage, only simple evaluation has been performed. More evaluation using bigger sample and projects need to be done. 

5. The paper is very much readable and looks promising. 

6. Comparison with other similar approaches can be discussed in the conclusion. 

Author Response

Thank you very much for your review and suggestions.

The paper contains some large images, which make the paper quite long. But the images contain important information, which makes them very crucial for understanding the whole paper. However, we converted selected descriptions into a shorter format. Regarding the evaluation, there is no standard way to measure the maintainability and reusability of code we could identify. A long-term study with company practitioners will follow this manuscript in consequent work; however, it will be extensive work for another manuscript. We have a future plan to continue our research in this field to identify other suitable ways to measure these factors. But it will take a long time to research spanning greatly over the requested period of time we were asked for this review. We also added more discussion in the conclusion and discussed the comparison with related works.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper proposes a new technique to assign priorities to code smells detected on a software. The generated priority allows developers to focus the refactoring on the most critical parts of the software.

Here are some remarks about the paper:

• The introduction does not state clearly the problem that is tackled in the paper and should summarise what the proposed technique will be used for.
• The contribution and research question are not clearly stated in the paper.
• It seems to me that the main contribution is the prioritisation factor described on page 10. If it is the case, this result should come way earlier in the paper and not in the implementation section. For example, Section 4 could contain a "modelling" subsection explaining how you propose to define the priority.
• Section 6 seems quite "weak" and refers to non-existing figures and tables. Therefore, it does not bring a lot to the paper nor does it bring answer elements to the (missing) research question.

Also, English should be checked thoroughly since many spelling or grammar errors can be found at several places. For example:

• line 121: "to comprehending" => "to comprehend"
• line 155: "parallelly" => "in parallel"
• line 322: "This graph is actually is the basis..." (double "is")
• ...

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors need to improve the overall presentation of the paper. For example - Provide structured abstract.

Abstract: 

1. Please make sure the Abstract includes the following highlights from the paper:
   a)      State clearly what is the purpose of the paper, i.e. what are the research questions or research objectives
   b)      Indicate what is the methodology/approach employed, methods of data collection used, and indicate the sample used
   c)      Highlight the major findings
   d)      Provide a major policy suggestion/ implication of the study
   e)      End by stating what is the original contribution of the research

 

2. I strongly suggest you read and follow the below paper for improving various components of the paper (especially abstract, introduction, results, and conclusion).

'A Step by Step Guide for Choosing Project Topics and Writing Research Papers in ICT Related Disciplines', Communications in Computer and Information Science (CCIS, volume 1350). Springer 2021

Download it from the Springer website(https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-030-69143-1_55) otherwise leave a request on ResearchGate on https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349300603_A_Step_by_Step_Guide_for_Choosing_Project_Topics_and_Writing_Research_Papers_in_ICT_Related_Disciplines

please cite the above work (not as a technical paper but as a reference paper for structuring various components of paper)?

Introduction and Related work 

3. Also, cite some papers from journals to prove that your work is under the scope of the journal.

4. The literature review is weak. Authors need to do a more comprehensive review for increasing the quality and quantity of the review. Some suggested related references valuable for your work are given below

Aljawabrah, Nadera, et al. "Automated recovery and visualization of test-to-code traceability (TCT) links an evaluation." IEEE Access 9 (2021): 40111-40123.

Arogundade, Oluwasefunmi Tale, et al. "From Modeling to Code Generation: An Enhanced and Integrated Approach." Innovations in Information and Communication Technologies (IICT-2020). Springer, Cham, 2021. 421-427.

Gupta, Himanshu, et al. "An Empirical Study to Investigate Data Sampling Techniques for Improving Code-Smell Prediction Using Imbalanced Data." International Conference on Information and Communication Technology and Applications. Springer, Cham, 2020.

Gupta, Aakanshi, et al. "Software code smell prediction model using Shannon, Rényi and Tsallis entropies." Entropy 20.5 (2018): 372.

Gupta, Aakanshi, et al.,  "A systematic literature review: code bad smells in java source code." International Conference on Computational Science and Its Applications. Springer, Cham, 2017.

5. Provide a table for comparison of related work. 
6. Merge section 3- background with related work section as a new section- Background and Related work 
7. Use Grammarly to improve the English of your paper or proofread with an English expert.
8. You have not provided any quantitative data in the results and discussion.  Also, provide a clear-cut comparison with other similar works. 
9. Please work on revision on your paper seriously. Try to incorporate all the reviewer’s suggestions. You must have valid justification If you disagree with any comment(s). your paper will be evaluated again to check for the compliance of reviewer(s)'s comments in the revised paper.

Author Response

Thank you very much for the review. I have attached a file containing the response for comments. I hope it will address your question and comments.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

I think that the paper requires some improvements before being published. In particular, the empirical validation, discussion about it, and conclusions require to be improved.

The “Case study evaluation” section is not clear at all. The authors state that the goal of their case study is “To evaluate the performance of our proposed approach”. How did you evaluate the results obtained? What is the measurement plan adopted? What is the baseline result? Furthermore, no empirical data is provided at all.
Finally, one variable used to categorize the code smells is the code smell criticality. In this regard, how are distant the categorization based on prioritization and that based on criticality? 

The conclusions section does not report any significant result but only the limitations of the proposed approach and some ideas for future works. It would be appropriate to highlight the most significant results and, then, briefly reports limitations and future works.

I do not agree with “The importance of a specific portion of a large project depends on the usage frequency of that portion”. A portion of a large project could be used infrequently but, at the same time, its use could be critical for the entire application.  In other terms, more variables con affect the “The importance of a specific portion of a large project”.
Again, I do not agree with “Multiple other variables are important for this prioritization. In this research work, we will try to discover them.” because in the rest of the paper the authors do not discover what are the “other variables”.

 

Minor issue:
There is a typo in “It however, cannot predice how users will use the program”
There is a typo in “Number of code smell in each cluster:”
There is a typo in “Look at Fig. ??”
There is a typo in “To fix a code smells,”

Author Response

Thank you very much for your insightful comment. In the attached file, we have tried our best to answer all the missing components that are mentioned.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

I am satisfied with revision