Home // ICSEA 2020, The Fifteenth International Conference on Software Engineering Advances // View article

An Architectural Smell Evaluation in an Industrial Context

Authors:
Francesca Arcelli Fontana
Federico Locatelli
Ilaria Pigazzini
Paolo Mereghetti

Keywords: Architectural Smells; Architectural Debt; Industrial study; Refactoring; Criticality.

Abstract:
A known symptom of architectural erosion is the presence of architectural smells in software systems. They are the result of design decisions which negatively impact on software quality, and may lead to what is called Architectural Technical Debt. When such problems arise, developers feel difficulties in maintaining and evolving their architectures. Some tools have been developed to automatically identify architectural smells and in this study we propose the evaluation of architecture erosion in an industrial context through Arcan, an analysis tool able to identify eight architectural smells. In particular, we report the results of an industrial case study born from the collaboration between a Laboratory of the University of Milano-Bicocca and an italian company active in the software consulting field. The study has been structured as a survey on the architectural smells detected by the tool, from which we collected the feedback and opinions of the three projects' developers. Developers learned about architectural smells and became aware of the fact that their project had additional problems with respect to what they knew. We propose this work as a pilot for future works on the perception of AS in industrial context.

Pages: 68 to 74

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2020

Publication date: October 18, 2020

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4235

ISBN: 978-1-61208-827-3

Location: Porto, Portugal

Dates: from October 18, 2020 to October 22, 2020