Detecting architecturally-relevant code anomalies
Manuele Ferreira, Eiji Barbosa, Isela Macia, Roberta Arcoverde, Alessandro Garcia · 2014
Code anomalies are structural problems in the program. Even though they might represent symptoms of architecture degradation, several code anomalies do not contribute to this process. Source code inspection by developers might not support time-effective detection of architecturally-relevant anomalies in a program. Hence, they usually rely on multiple software metrics known to effectively detect code anomalies. However, there is still no empirical knowledge about the time effectiveness of metric-based strategies to detect architecturally-relevant anomalies. Given the longitudinal nature of this activity, we performed a first exploratory case study to address this gap. We compare metrics-based strategies with manual inspections made by the actual software developers. The study was conducted in the context of a legacy software system with 30K lines of code, 415 architectural elements, 210 versions, and embracing reengineering effort for almost 3 years. Effectiveness was assessed in terms of several quantitative and qualitative indicators. To measure the effort, we computed the amount of time used in several activities required to identify architecturally-relevant code anomalies. The results of our study shed light on potential effort reduction and effectiveness improvements of metrics-based strategies.