TY - JOUR
T1 - On the relation between architectural smells and source code changes
AU - Sas, Darius
AU - Avgeriou, Paris
AU - Pigazzini, Ilaria
AU - Arcelli Fontana, Francesca
N1 - Funding Information:
We would like to thank the Center for Information Technology of the University of Groningen for their support and for providing access to the Peregrine High Performance Computing cluster. This work was supported by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 780572 SDK4ED ( https://sdk4ed.eu/ ), as well as ITEA3 and RVO under grant agreement No. 17038 VISDOM ( https://visdom-project.github.io/website/ ).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Authors. Journal of Software: Evolution and Process published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
PY - 2022/1
Y1 - 2022/1
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - architectural smells
KW - architectural technical debt
KW - empirical study
KW - software repository mining
KW - technical debt
KW - technical debt interest
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85118223514&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1002/smr.2398
DO - 10.1002/smr.2398
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85118223514
VL - 34
JO - Journal of software-Evolution and process
JF - Journal of software-Evolution and process
SN - 2047-7481
IS - 1
M1 - e2398
ER -