Evolutionary Analysis of the Co-occurrence between Code Smells and Community Smells in Code Samples

Context: Code samples are widely used to demonstrate best practices and facilitate framework adoption, promoting productivity and innovation. In open-source projects, their evolution often involves diverse contributions, introducing technical complexity and challenges in community collaboration. This scenario can leads to the co-occurrence of Code Smells and Community Smells, impacting software quality, collaboration, and the sustainability of developer communities. Problem: The simultaneous evolution of Code Smells and Community Smells degrades code quality, reduces developer cohesion, and lowers collaborative efficiency, increasing the likelihood of project failure and making projects less appealing to new contributors. Solution: This study investigates how the co-occurrence and evolution of Code Smells and Community Smells interact over time. It proposes strategies based on metrics and temporal analysis to mitigate these impacts, improve maintainability, and strengthen community dynamics. Information Systems Theory: Social Network Theory provides a foundation to analyze the influence of human interactions on project evolution and team cohesion. Method: We mined open-source repositories—using techniques such as commit history mining, bug log analysis, and code metric extraction—and temporal analysis to quantitatively track and correlate the evolution of Code Smells and Community Smells across project milestones. Results Summary: Local commit surges trigger transient complexity spikes; geographic dispersion reduces cohesion; and diverse teams correlate with controlled code growth. Overall, smells interact to degrade maintainability and collaboration. Contributions: Addressing the SBSI Grand Challenges (2016–2026), this study integrates technical and social perspectives, fostering sustainable practices in open-source projects and enhancing the resilience and effectiveness of developer communities.