TY - GEN
T1 - Quantifying architectural debts
AU - Xiao, Lu
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 ACM.
PY - 2015/8/30
Y1 - 2015/8/30
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Architectural debt
KW - Maintenance costs
KW - Refactoring
KW - Software architecture
KW - Software quality
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84960426018&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84960426018&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/2786805.2803194
DO - 10.1145/2786805.2803194
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84960426018
T3 - 2015 10th Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, ESEC/FSE 2015 - Proceedings
SP - 1030
EP - 1033
BT - 2015 10th Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, ESEC/FSE 2015 - Proceedings
T2 - 10th Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, ESEC/FSE 2015
Y2 - 30 August 2015 through 4 September 2015
ER -