Abstract
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.
Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
