System and method for automatically detecting and correcting code smells using a language-independent domain-specific language

A computer workstation system having memory and processing circuitry and equipped with a software tool for automatically detecting code smells in a source code in any of a plurality of object-oriented programming languages and performing language-specific code correction, comprising:

• a user input device configured to select and retrieve a source code file with the source code from the memory;
• the memory storing a Domain Specific Language (DSL) component for maintaining a representation of linguistic structures of a DSL using a formal grammar, wherein the DSL is a language-independent formal language to solve a class of problems in a domain of knowledge;
• the processing circuitry configured with
• a code smells detection component to apply smell detection rules to the source code in the source code file to detect potential code smells, wherein each smell detection rule is for detecting a code smell type, wherein the code smells detection component maintains an extensible set of smell specifications templates;
• a code smells correction component that applies the DSL to specify specific corrective actions for each detected code smell and generates corrected source code based on the corrective actions;
• and
• a reporting component that outputs a file with a correction report for the corrected source code to the memory.