Towards an Architectural Debt Index

Abstract

Different indexes have been proposed to evaluate software quality and technical debt. Usually these indexes take into account different code level issues and several metrics, well known software metrics or new ones defined ad hoc for a specific purpose. In this paper we propose and define a new index, more oriented to the evaluation of architectural violations. We describe in detail the index, called Architectural Debt Index, that we integrated in a tool developed for architectural smell detection. The index is based on the detection of architectural smells, their criticality and their history. Currently only dependency architectural smells have been considered, but other architectural debt indicators can be considered and integrated in the index computation.

Investigating Instability Architectural Smells Evolution: An Exploratory Case Study

“…c) Centrality: The centrality metric selected is PageRank [9]. We decided to measure the PageRank of a smell as the maximum PageRank value of the affected components and then weight it against the number of elements in each version.…”

“…Another study that considers the history of architectural smells was published by Roveda et al [9]. In their work, the authors try to estimate the architectural debt index using architectural smells and track the evolution of the index throughout a system's history.…”

Identifying and Prioritizing Architectural Debt Through Architectural Smells: A Case Study in a Large Software Company

“…We aim to better explore the refactoring cost of the smells to improve the prioritization of the smells to be removed first. According to this aspect we would like to ask practitioners to evaluate the usefulness of a new Architectural Debt Index [25], which allows to identify and assess the overall architectural debt of a project by taking into account the severity of each archi-tectural smell. The index can be used to evaluate the most critical parts and to monitor the evolution of the architectural debt during the project history.…”

Architecture Anti-Patterns: Automatically Detectable Violations of Design Principles

“…For example, Le et al [74] proposed a taxonomy of architecture smells, two of which are based on evolution history, but without rigorous formal definitions. Roveda et al [75] proposed an Architecture Debt Index (ADI) that integrates a suite of existing architecture smells, including some of our anti-patterns, and takes into account their severity as revealed in a project's evolution history. Unlike our approach, these studies did not formalize these architecture smells, nor did they explicitly demonstrate the feasibility of their automatic detection.…”