code smell

Anything in a program's source code that suggests the presence of a design problem.

Noun

  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:

Origin

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.

Forms

code smells

Related

clean code refactoring