Do Developers Care about Code Smells? A Replicated Study from Chile

Code smells are a metaphor to describe symptoms in the code that may provoke maintainability problems. Code smell detection and remove have a closer relationship to refactoring which has been a well-known and disseminated practice for improving software maintenance and reuse. In 2013 a study for knowing about the position and knowledge of developers was conducted from Norway. This study covered developers from more than 25 different countries and got interesting results about code smells. In this paper we have replicated this study by interviewing exclusively Chilean participants. The results indicate few differences on poor comprehension about object orientation and a better position of the current Chilean concerns on code smells and refactoring.