Software Engineering Institute

In our studies of many large-scale software systems, we have observed that defective files seldom exist alone. They are usually architecturally connected, and their architectural structures exhibit significant design flaws that propagate bugginess among files. We call these flawed structures the architecture roots, a type of technical debt that incurs high maintenance penalties. Removing the architecture roots of bugginess requires refactoring, but the benefits of refactoring have historically been difficult for architects to quantify or justify. In this podcast, Rick Kazman and Carol Woody discuss an approach to model and analyze software architecture as a set of design rule spaces). Using data extracted from the project’s development artifacts, this approach identifies the files implicated in architecture flaws and suggest refactorings based on removing these flaws.