code smell

English

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.

Noun

code smell (plural code smells)

1. (programming) Anything in a program's source code that suggests the presence of a design problem.
   • 2021, Christian Clausen, Five Lines of Code: How and when to Refactor, Manning, →ISBN, page 4:

     A well-known code smell is as follows: a function should do one thing.

Translations

design problem in code

• Finnish: purkka (fi)
• German: Code-Smell m

See also

• clean code
• refactoring

Further reading

• code smell on Wikipedia.Wikipedia