Automatic detection of bad smells in Java code

Refactoring is the process of restructuring the code without changing the external behavior of the code. Refactoring focuses on improving the structure of the code so that it becomes more understandable, structural and flexible to changes. Restructuring the code helps in reducing the overall software maintenance cost and improves the structure of the code which helps the programmers to better understand the code and the software system.;The first step in the process of refactoring is the detection of bad smell or code smell. Bad smells are nothing but bad programming practices followed by the programmers like keeping the class or method size very long, including too many comments in the code, same code in two or more different places. With the increasing number and size of code files these days it has become extremely difficult to manually find the bad smells in the code which can be scattered in more than one file.;This thesis presents the automatic detection of nine bad smells in the Java source code through the use of software metrics and software visualization.