Certain design fragments in software architectures can have a negative impact on system maintainability. In this paper, we introduce the concept of architectural "bad smells," which are frequently recurring software designs that can have non-obvious and significant detrimental effects on system lifecycle properties. We define architectural smells and differentiate them from related concepts, such as architectural antipatterns and code smells. We also describe four representative architectural smells we encountered in the context of reverse-engineering eighteen grid technologies and refactoring one large industrial system.

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Abstract-Many automated techniques of varying accuracy have been developed to help recover the architecture of a software system from its implementation. However, rigorously assessing these techniques has been hampered by the lack of architectural "ground truths". Over the past several years, we have collected a set of eight architectures that have been recovered from opensource systems and independently, carefully verified. In this paper, we use these architectures as ground truths in performing a comparative analysis of six state-of-the-art software architecture recovery techniques. We use a number of metrics to assess each technique for its ability to identify a system's architectural components and overall architectural structure. Our results suggest that two of the techniques routinely outperform the rest, but even the best of the lot has surprisingly low accuracy. Based on the empirical data, we identify several avenues of future research in software architecture recovery.

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