How Deep is the Mud: Fathoming Architecture Technical Debt Using Designite

Abstract

The quality of software architecture is an important concern for any software development team. Architecture smells represent quality issues at architecture granularity. Identifying and refactoring them periodically is a necessity to keep architecture quality high. We present Designite, a software design quality assessment tool, that identifies seven well-known architecture smells. Along with the identification, the tool provides supplementary information such as cause and responsible classes for each identified smell instance to help developers understand and refactor the smell. The tool is relevant and useful in both research and practice context. Software developers may use it to identify technical debt instances and to refactor them. On the other hand, software engineering researchers may use the tool to carry out large-scale empirical studies concerning code smells.