Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Martini, Antonio
• Fontana, Francesca Arcelli
• Biaggi, Andrea
• Roveda, Riccardo

Titel

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

Ist Teil von

• Software Architecture, 2018, p.320-335

Ort / Verlag

Cham: Springer International Publishing

Erscheinungsjahr

2018

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Architectural technical debt can have a huge impact on software maintainability and evolution. Hence, different 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 difficulty 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 effort.