Understanding Architecture Erosion: The Practitioners’ Perceptive

Abstract

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.

Understanding Architecture Erosion: The Practitioners' Perceptive

“…After the eighth most frequently mentioned websites, the rest had much lower frequencies so we considered the top eight. The complete list of websites and the corresponding frequencies are available online [31].…”

“…We further searched for these 38 practitioners on LinkedIn, in order to validate their identity, and gather missing background and contact information. We note that the anonymity of these developers is preserved in both the manuscript and the accompanying dataset [31].…”

“…Based on the selected posts and our RQs, we used similar questions for both the customized surveys and interviews (available online [31]). The questions were designed and refined iteratively by the authors.…”

“…Survey: We sent the questionnaire to the 38 practitioners, and 10 of them accepted our invitation to fill in the questionnaire. To make the questionnaire more relevant to the practitioners and improve the response rate, we sent each practitioner a customized version of the questionnaire [31], which was aligned with the post that he/she was involved by using the same term of AEr as the practitioner used to prevent misunderstanding. The survey responses were collected by Google Forms and saved in a Word document for later extraction and analysis (see Step (5)).…”

“…To effectively code and categorize data, we employed the MAXQDA tool [36] to help conduct manual data coding, which is a commercial tool for qualitative data analysis. All the data of this study is available online [31].…”