Towards an Architectural Debt Index

Roveda, Riccardo; Fontana, Francesca Arcelli; Pigazzini, Ilaria; Zanoni, Marco

doi:10.1109/seaa.2018.00073

Cited by 33 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…c) Centrality: The centrality metric selected is PageRank [9]. We decided to measure the PageRank of a smell as the maximum PageRank value of the affected components and then weight it against the number of elements in each version.…”

Section: B Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Investigating Instability Architectural Smells Evolution: An Exploratory Case Study

Sas

Avgeriou

Fontana

2019

2019 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)

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Architectural smells may substantially increase maintenance effort and thus require extra attention for potential refactoring. While we currently understand this concept and have identified different types of such smells, we have not yet studied their evolution in depth. This is necessary to inform their prioritisation and refactoring. This study analyses the evolution of individual architectural smell instances over time, and the characteristics that define these instances. Three different types of architectural smells are taken into consideration and mined from a total of 524 versions across 14 different projects. The results show how different smell types differ in multiple aspects, such as their growth rate, the importance of the affected elements over time in the dependency network of the system, and the time each instance affects the system. They also cast valuable insights on what aspects are the most important to consider during prioritisation and refactoring activities.

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Section: B Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Another study that considers the history of architectural smells was published by Roveda et al [9]. In their work, the authors try to estimate the architectural debt index using architectural smells and track the evolution of the index throughout a system's history.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Investigating Instability Architectural Smells Evolution: An Exploratory Case Study

Sas

Avgeriou

Fontana

2019

2019 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…We aim to better explore the refactoring cost of the smells to improve the prioritization of the smells to be removed first. According to this aspect we would like to ask practitioners to evaluate the usefulness of a new Architectural Debt Index [25], which allows to identify and assess the overall architectural debt of a project by taking into account the severity of each archi-tectural smell. The index can be used to evaluate the most critical parts and to monitor the evolution of the architectural debt during the project history.…”

Section: Conclusion and Future Developmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Identifying and Prioritizing Architectural Debt Through Architectural Smells: A Case Study in a Large Software Company

Martini

Fontana

Biaggi

et al. 2018

Software Architecture

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Architectural technical debt can have a huge impact on software maintainability and evolution. Hence, di↵erent architectural violations, detected as architectural smells, need to be identified and refactored. In this paper, we conducted a multiple case-study on several architectural smells detected in four industrial projects. We conducted an in-depth investigation with a questionnaire, interviews and thorough inspection of the code with the practitioners. We evaluated the negative impact of the technical debt detected by the architectural smells, their di culty to be refactored and the usefulness of the detection tool. The results show that practitioners appreciated the help of automatic detection, and that they prioritize refactoring architectural debt that causes more negative impact despite the higher refactoring e↵ort.

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“…For example, Le et al [74] proposed a taxonomy of architecture smells, two of which are based on evolution history, but without rigorous formal definitions. Roveda et al [75] proposed an Architecture Debt Index (ADI) that integrates a suite of existing architecture smells, including some of our anti-patterns, and takes into account their severity as revealed in a project's evolution history. Unlike our approach, these studies did not formalize these architecture smells, nor did they explicitly demonstrate the feasibility of their automatic detection.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Architecture Anti-Patterns: Automatically Detectable Violations of Design Principles

Cai

Kazman

et al. 2021

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

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In large-scale software systems, error-prone or change-prone files rarely stand alone. They are typically architecturally connected and their connections usually exhibit architecture problems causing the propagation of error-proneness or change-proneness. In this paper, we propose and empirically validate a suite of architecture anti-patterns that occur in all large-scale software systems and are involved in high maintenance costs. We define these architecture anti-patterns based on fundamental design principles and Baldwin and Clark's design rule theory. We can automatically detect these anti-patterns by analyzing a project's structural relationships and revision history. Through our analyses of 19 large-scale software projects, we demonstrate that these architecture anti-patterns have significant impact on files' bug-proneness and change-proneness. In particular, we show that 1) files involved in these architecture anti-patterns are more error-prone and change-prone; 2) the more anti-patterns a file is involved in, the more error-prone and change-prone it is; and 3) while all of our defined architecture anti-patterns contribute to file's error-proneness and change-proneness, Unstable Interface and Crossing contribute the most by far.

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Towards an Architectural Debt Index

Cited by 33 publications

References 26 publications

Investigating Instability Architectural Smells Evolution: An Exploratory Case Study

Investigating Instability Architectural Smells Evolution: An Exploratory Case Study

Identifying and Prioritizing Architectural Debt Through Architectural Smells: A Case Study in a Large Software Company

Architecture Anti-Patterns: Automatically Detectable Violations of Design Principles

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