Goal of your research

Objects of study: security smells

Purpose: to explore the detection of security smells

Quality: using code smell detection tools

Perspective: academic/researcher

Context: java applications

Analyze security smells

for the purpose of detection

with respect to existing code smell detection tools

from the point of view of a researcher

in the context of java applications

Context of your experiment

The experiment will be conducted on real projects fetched from open source repositories. The projects
will be mostly professional in nature, to depict a more real face of the problem.

Research Questions
Following are the formulated research questions for our experiment

RQ1: What security smells can be detected by JDeodorant?

RQ2: What type of security smells occur in different genres of Java Applications?

RQ3: How code maintainability triggers security smells in Java applications?

RQ4: How code changeability triggers security smells in Java Application?

RQ5: Are resource guidelines available for preventing security smells updated frequently?

Hypothesis Formulation

Two Hypothesis are formulated:

Null Hypothesis – Ho

 The existing code smell detection tools do not detect security smell occurrences in java
applications
µN old == µN new
Where µ is the mean amount of smells detected by a tool, which is zero.

Alternate Hypothesis – HA

 The existing code smell detection tools detects security smell occurrences in java applications
µN old < µN new
Where µ is the mean amount of smells detected by a tool.
Initially µN old is expected to be zero, as assumed in the Ho. The µN new in HA signifies the amount of
security smells a tool can detect.

List of Variables

1. Independent Variable : Security smell detection, java applications

2. Dependent Variable: Amount of security smells detected, security smells,
3. Constant Variables: Lines of Code, Java Applications of different Genres
4. Latent Variables : Code Maintainability, Code Changeability

Subject
Population: Java Applications mined from GitHub

Sample: The applications which have different security smells

Sampling Frame: The java applications which have security smells detected from JDeodorant

Sample Size: Four to five java applications which have security smells detected from JDeodorant

Expected Data/Dataset
The expected data or dataset is the java applications of different genre which we will be mining from
github. It will be including all the security smells involved.