Skip to content
ontologydriven
Sign out

Dictionary

Words, grammatical forms and meanings linked to the ontology.

code smell en · NOUN

Etymology

Analogous to a bad smell indicating e.g. rotten food. Apparently coined by American software engineer Kent Beck, in the late 1990s. Popularized via the book Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, co-authored by Beck.

Meanings

  1. Anything in a program's source code that suggests the presence of a design problem.
    • A well-known code smell is as follows: a function should do one thing. 2021, Christian Clausen, Five Lines of Code: How and when to Refactor, Manning, →ISBN, page 4:

Forms

SpellingFeaturesLabelsSource
code smells Number=Plur lexicographic

Relateds

clean code · refactoring

Translations (2)

de Code-Smell (design problem in code) · fi koodihaju (design problem in code)