Do Experts Agree About Smelly Infrastructure?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Code smells are anti-patterns that violate code understandability, re-usability, changeability, and maintainability. It is important to identify code smells and locate them in the code. For this purpose, automated detection of code smells is a sought-after feature for development tools; however, the design and evaluation of such tools depends on the quality of oracle datasets. The typical approach for creating an oracle dataset involves multiple developers independently inspecting and annotating code examples for their existing code smells. Since multiple inspectors cast votes about each code example, it is possible for the inspectors to disagree about the presence of smells. Such disagreements introduce ambiguity into how smells should be interpreted. Prior work has studied developer perceptions of code smells in traditional source code; however, smells in Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) have not been investigated. To understand the real-world impact of disagreements among developers and their perceptions of IaC code smells, we conduct an empirical study on the oracle dataset of GLITCH—a state-of-the-art detection tool for security code smells in IaC. We analyze GLITCH's oracle dataset for code smell issues, their types, and individual annotations of the inspectors. Furthermore, we investigate possible confounding factors associated with the incidences of developer misaligned perceptions of IaC code smells. Finally, we triangulate developer perceptions of code smells in traditional source code with our results on IaC. Our study reveals that unlike developer perceptions of smells in traditional source code, their perceptions of smells in IaC are more substantially impacted by subjective interpretation of smell types and their co-occurrence relationships. For instance, the interpretation of admins by default, empty passwords, and hard-coded secrets varies considerably among raters and are more susceptible to misidentification than other IaC code smells. Consequently, the manual identification of IaC code smells involves annotation disagreements among developers—46.3% of studied IaC code smell incidences have at least one dissenting vote among three inspectors. Meanwhile, only 1.6% of code smell incidences in traditional source code are affected by inspector bias stemming from these disagreements. Hence, relying solely on the majority voting, would not fully represent the breadth of interpretation of the IaC under scrutiny.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.018 | 0.111 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".