A blessing in disguise? Assessing the Relationship between Code Smells and Sustainability

Code smells have always been associated with bad code source quality and maintenance problems by the research community. However, a few code smells remain within code for years without influence a project, and some of the developers do not even recognize them. This late-breaking idea paper wants to investigate the role of code smells within the context of software quality and the sustainability of projects. For this reason, we first plan to understand the impact of code smells on sustainability and then perform a fine-grain analysis to analyze their evolution, focusing on the possible benefits of their presence.