Logo image
Back
A Longitudinal Study of Identifying and Paying Down Architecture Debt
Conference proceeding

A Longitudinal Study of Identifying and Paying Down Architecture Debt

Maleknaz Nayebi, Yuanfang Cai, Rick Kazman, Guenther Ruhe, Qiong Feng, Chris Carlson, Francis Chew and IEEE
2019 IEEE/ACM 41st International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice (ICSE-SEIP)
May 2019
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE-SEIP.2019.00026

Abstract

Architecture debt Companies Computer architecture Computer bugs Cost-benefit analysis Longitudinal study Measurement Refactoring Software systems
Architecture debt is a form of technical debt that derives from the gap between the intended and the actual architecture design. In this study we measured architecture debt in two ways: 1) in terms of system-wide coupling measures, and 2) in terms of the number and severity of architecture flaws. In recent research it was shown that the amount of architecture debt has a huge impact on software maintainability and evolution. Consequently, reducing debt is expected to make software less costly and more amenable to change. This paper reports on a longitudinal study of a healthcare communications product created by BrightSquid Secure Communications Corp. This young company is facing the typical trade-off problem of desiring responsiveness to change requests, but wanting to avoid the ever-increasing effort that the accumulation of quick-and-dirty changes eventually incurs. In the first stage of the study, we analyzed the status of the "before" system, which showed the impacts of change requests. This initial study motivated a more in-depth analysis of architecture debt. The results of this debt analysis were used in the second stage of the work to motivate a comprehensive refactoring of the software system. The third stage was a follow-on architecture debt analysis which quantified the improvements realized. Using this quantitative evidence, augmented by qualitative evidence gathered from in-depth interviews with BrightSquid's architects, we present lessons learned about the costs and benefits of paying down architecture debt in practice.

Metrics

12 Record Views
27 citations in Web of Science
27 citations in Scopus

Details

InCites Highlights

Data related to this publication, from InCites Benchmarking & Analytics tool:

Collaboration types
Domestic collaboration
International collaboration
Web of Science research areas
Computer Science, Software Engineering
Logo image