An architecture smell knowledge base for managing architecture technical debt
Paula Rachow, Matthias Riebisch · 2022
Many software projects suffer from architecture erosion and architecture technical debt. One challenge is to identify affected parts and prioritize them for refactoring. Architecture smells are indicators of potential architecture technical debt, but architecture smells are ambiguous and their impact is not always clear. To address this, we have built a knowledge base that improves understanding of architecture smells and identifies violated software design principles and affected quality attributes. The design principles help our understanding of what causes architecture smells, while the impaired quality attributes represent the consequences. We conducted a systematic literature review to identify these relations and built an architecture smell ontology. This ontology provides a knowledge base that architects can use to prioritize the smells according to the project's individual quality goals.