Code smells are a well-known metaphor to describe
symptoms of code decay or other issues with code quality which
can lead to a variety of maintenance problems. Even though
code smell detection and removal has been well-researched over
the last decade, it remains open to debate whether or not code
smells should be considered meaningful conceptualizations of
code quality issues from the developer’s perspective. To some
extent, this question applies as well to the results provided
by current code smell detection tools. Are code smells really
important for developers? If they are not, is this due to the
lack of relevance of the underlying concepts, due to the lack of
awareness about code smells on the developers’ side, or due to
the lack of appropriate tools for code smell analysis or removal?
In order to align and direct research efforts to address actual
needs and problems of professional developers, we need to better
understand the knowledge about, and interest in code smells,
together with their perceived criticality. This paper reports on
the results obtained from an exploratory survey involving 85
professional software developers.