Quantifying architectural debts

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

    3 Scopus citations

    Abstract

    In our prior research, we found that problematic architectural connections can propagate errors. We also found that among multiple files, the architectural connections that violate common design principles strongly correlate with the error-proneness of files. The flawed architectural connections, if not fixed properly and timely, can become debts that accumulate high interest in terms of maintenance costs over time. In this paper, we define architectural debts as clusters of files with problematic architectural connections among them, and their connections incur high maintenance costs over time. Our goal is to 1) precisely identify which and how many files are involved in architectural debts; 2) quantify the penalties of architectural debts in terms of mainte-nance costs; and 3) model the growth trend of penalties- maintenance costs-that accumulate due to architectural debts. We plan to provide a quantitative model for project managers and stakeholders as a reference in making decisions of whether, when and where to invest in refactoring.

    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publication2015 10th Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, ESEC/FSE 2015 - Proceedings
    Pages1030-1033
    Number of pages4
    ISBN (Electronic)9781450336758
    DOIs
    StatePublished - 30 Aug 2015
    Event10th Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, ESEC/FSE 2015 - Bergamo, Italy
    Duration: 30 Aug 20154 Sep 2015

    Publication series

    Name2015 10th Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, ESEC/FSE 2015 - Proceedings

    Conference

    Conference10th Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, ESEC/FSE 2015
    Country/TerritoryItaly
    CityBergamo
    Period30/08/154/09/15

    Keywords

    • Architectural debt
    • Maintenance costs
    • Refactoring
    • Software architecture
    • Software quality

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