As software systems evolve, their architecture is meant to adapt accordingly by following the changes in requirements, the environment, and the implementation. However, in practice, the evolving system often deviates from the architecture, causing severe consequences to system maintenance and evolution. This phenomenon of architecture erosion has been studied extensively in research, but not yet been examined from the point of view of developers. In this exploratory study, we look into how developers perceive the notion of architecture erosion, its causes and consequences, as well as tools and practices to identify and control architecture erosion. To this end, we searched through several popular online developer communities for collecting data of discussions related to architecture erosion. Besides, we identified developers involved in these discussions and conducted a survey with 10 participants and held interviews with 4 participants. Our findings show that: (1) developers either focus on the structural manifestation of architecture erosion or on its effect on run-time qualities, maintenance and evolution;(2) alongside technical factors, architecture erosion is caused to a large extent by non-technical factors; (3) despite the lack of dedicated tools for detecting architecture erosion, developers usually identify erosion through a number of symptoms; and (4) there are effective measures that can help to alleviate the impact of architecture erosion.
Architecture erosion (AEr) can adversely affect software development and has received significant attention in the last decade. However, there is an absence of a comprehensive understanding of the state of research about the reasons and consequences of AEr, and the countermeasures to address AEr. This work aims at systematically investigating, identifying, and analyzing the reasons, consequences, and ways of detecting and handling AEr. With 73 studies included, the main results are as follows: (1) AEr manifests not only through architectural violations and structural issues but also causing problems in software quality and during software evolution; (2) non-technical reasons that cause AEr should receive the same attention as technical reasons, and practitioners should raise awareness of the grave consequences of AEr, thereby taking actions to tackle AEr-related issues; (3) a spectrum of approaches, tools, and measures has been proposed and employed to detect and tackle AEr; and (4) three categories of difficulties and five categories of lessons learned on tackling AEr were identified. The results can provide researchers a comprehensive understanding of AEr and help practitioners handle AEr and improve the sustainability of their architecture. More empirical studies are required to investigate the practices of detecting and addressing AEr in industrial settings.
The phenomenon of architecture erosion can negatively impact the maintenance and evolution of software systems, and manifest in a variety of symptoms during software development. While erosion is often considered rather late, its symptoms can act as early warnings to software developers, if detected in time. In addition to static source code analysis, code reviews can be a source of detecting erosion symptoms and subsequently taking action. In this study, we investigate the erosion symptoms discussed in code reviews, as well as their trends, and the actions taken by developers. Specifically, we conducted an empirical study with the two most active Open Source Software (OSS) projects in the OpenStack community (i.e., Nova and Neutron). We manually checked 21,274 code review comments retrieved by keyword search and random selection, and identified 502 code review comments (from 472 discussion threads) that discuss erosion. Our findings show that (1) the proportion of erosion symptoms is rather low, yet notable in code reviews and the most frequently identified erosion symptoms are architectural violation, duplicate functionality, and cyclic dependency; (2) the declining trend of the identified erosion symptoms in the two OSS projects indicates that the architecture tends to stabilize over time; and (3) most code reviews that identify erosion symptoms have a positive impact on removing erosion symptoms, but a few symptoms still remain and are ignored by developers. The results suggest that (1) code review provides a practical way to reduce erosion symptoms; and (2) analyzing the trend of erosion symptoms can help get an insight about the erosion status of software systems, and subsequently avoid the potential risk of architecture erosion.
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