On the evolution and impact of architectural smells—an industrial case study

Abstract

Architectural smells (AS) are notorious for their long-term impact on the Maintainability and Evolvability of software systems. The majority of research work has investigated this topic by mining software repositories of open source Java systems, making it hard to generalise and apply them to an industrial context and other programming languages. To address this research gap, we conducted an embedded multiple-case case study, in collaboration with a large industry partner, to study how AS evolve in industrial embedded systems. We detect and track AS in 9 C/C++ projects with over 30 releases for each project that span over two years of development, with over 20 millions lines of code in the last release only. In addition to these quantitative results, we also interview 12 among the developers and architects working on these projects, collecting over six hours of qualitative data about the usefulness of AS analysis and the issues they experienced while maintaining and evolving artefacts affected by AS. Our quantitative findings show how individual smell instances evolve over time, how long they typically survive within the system, how they overlap with instances of other smell types, and finally what the introduction order of smell types is when they overlap. Our qualitative findings, instead, provide insights on the effects of AS on the long-term maintainability and evolvability of the system, supported by several excerpts from our interviews. Practitioners also mention what parts of the AS analysis actually provide actionable insights that they can use to plan refactoring activities.