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On the relation between architectural smells and source code changes

Authors:

Paris Avgeriou,

Ilaria Pigazzini,

Francesca Arcelli FontanaAuthors Info & Claims

Journal of Software: Evolution and Process, Volume 34, Issue 1

https://doi.org/10.1002/smr.2398

Published: 18 January 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Although architectural smells are one of the most studied type of architectural technical debt, their impact on maintenance effort has not been thoroughly investigated. Studying this impact would help to understand how much technical debt interest is being paid due to the existence of architecture smells and how this interest can be calculated. This work is a first attempt to address this issue by investigating the relation between architecture smells and source code changes. Specifically, we study whether the frequency and size of changes are correlated with the presence of a selected set of architectural smells. We detect architectural smells using the Arcan tool, which detects architectural smells by building a dependency graph of the system analyzed and then looking for the typical structures of the architectural smells. The findings, based on a case study of 31 open‐source Java systems, show that 87% of the analyzed commits present more changes in artifacts with at least one smell, and the likelihood of changing increases with the number of smells. Moreover, there is also evidence to confirm that change frequency increases after the introduction of a smell and that the size of changes is also larger in smelly artifacts. These findings hold true especially in Medium–Large and Large artifacts.

Graphical Abstract

Allegedly, architectural smells (ASs) increase the effort necessary for developers to efficiently maintain and evolve their software. In this work, we mine, from over 30 Java projects and their software repositories, the AS affecting the projects and how source code files changed over time. Findings show that the presence of an AS in a software artifact correlates with an increased code churn and change frequency in the smelly files in contrast to non‐smelly files.

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Cited By

Perera JTempero ETu YBlincoe K(2023)Understanding the relationship between Technical Debt, New Code Cost and Rework Cost in Open-Source Software Projects: An Empirical StudyProceedings of the 27th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering10.1145/3593434.3593490(247-252)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3593434.3593490
Arcelli Fontana FCamilli MRendina DTaraboi ATrubiani C(2023)Impact of Architectural Smells on Software Performance: an Exploratory StudyProceedings of the 27th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering10.1145/3593434.3593442(22-31)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3593434.3593442

Index Terms

On the relation between architectural smells and source code changes
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Management of computing and information systems
      1. Software management
        Software maintenance
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software post-development issues
  2. Software notations and tools
    1. Software configuration management and version control systems

Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.

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Information & Contributors

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Published In

cover image Journal of Software: Evolution and Process

Journal of Software: Evolution and Process Volume 34, Issue 1

January 2022

103 pages

ISSN:2047-7473

EISSN:2047-7481

DOI:10.1002/smr.v34.1

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© 2021 The Authors. Journal of Software: Evolution and Process published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

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John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

United States

Publication History

Published: 18 January 2022

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Cited By

Perera JTempero ETu YBlincoe K(2023)Understanding the relationship between Technical Debt, New Code Cost and Rework Cost in Open-Source Software Projects: An Empirical StudyProceedings of the 27th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering10.1145/3593434.3593490(247-252)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3593434.3593490
Arcelli Fontana FCamilli MRendina DTaraboi ATrubiani C(2023)Impact of Architectural Smells on Software Performance: an Exploratory StudyProceedings of the 27th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering10.1145/3593434.3593442(22-31)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3593434.3593442

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