Investigando o impacto dos code smells na manutenibilidade de aplicações JavaScript e TypeScript

Abstract

In a constantly evolving technological scenario, the maintainability of software systems has become a critical factor in the long-term success of any project. Mainly in context of web development, where languages like JavaScript and TypeScript play a key role in creating these applications. In this context, code smells are seen as a threat to maintainability and imply the need to refactor the systems. This study evaluates the maintainability and the impact of code smells in projects that use the JavaScript and TypeScript programming languages. For the realization of this study, ten projects JavaScript and ten TypeScript projects were selected via the Github API. They were collected and analyzed the code smells of the selected projects using the Embold tool and the collection of maintainability metrics was carried out using the Understand tool. From these data, the following results were obtained: (i) the complexity to detect code smells it is larger in JavaScript projects; (ii) the Nested Callback, Shotgun Surgery and Message code smells Chain were detected; (iii) the codebase and comment rate of JavaScript projects is always bigger compared to TypeScript projects; (iv) JavaScript projects are more complex in relation to TypeScript projects; (v) code smells density indicated a better score for JavaScript projects. It was found that TypeScript projects are better structured and less complex compared to JavaScript projects. Despite this, it was concluded that the choice isolated from using TypeScript does not guarantee good maintainability rates and code smells.