Are Domain-Specific Detection Strategies for Code Anomalies Reusable? An Industry Multi-project Study

To prevent the quality decay, detection strategies are reused to identify symptoms of maintainability problems in the entire program. A detection strategy is a heuristic composed by the following elements: software metrics, thresholds, and logical operators combining them. The adoption of detection strategies is largely dependent on their reuse across the portfolio of the organizations software projects. If developers need to define or tailor those strategy elements to each project, their use will become time-consuming and neglected. Nevertheless, there is no evidence about efficient reuse of detection strategies across multiple software projects. Therefore, we conduct an industry multi-project study to evaluate the reusability of detection strategies in a critical domain. We assessed the degree of accurate reuse of previously-proposed detection strategies based on the judgment of domain specialists. The study revealed that even though the reuse of strategies in a specific domain should be encouraged, their accuracy is still limited when holistically applied to all the modules of a program. However, the accuracy and reuse were both significantly improved when the metrics, thresholds and logical operators were tailored to each recurring concern of the domain.