On the criteria for prioritizing code anomalies to identify architectural problems

WILLIAN OIZUMI; CLAUDIA MARCOS; SANTIAGO A. VIDAL; ALESSANDRO FABRICIO GARCIA; EVERTON GUIMARAES; JORGE ANDRES DIAZ PACE

Pisa

Simposio; 31st Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC '16); 2016

ACM

Architectural problems constantly affect evolving software projects. When not properly addressed, those problems can hinder the longevity of a software system. Some studies revealed that a wide range of architectural problems are reflected in source code through code anomalies. However, a software project often contains thousands of code anomalies and many of them have no relation to architectural problems. As a consequence, developers struggle to effectively determine which (groups of) anomalies are architecturally relevant. This work proposes criteria for prioritizing groups of code anomalies as indicators of architectural problems in evolving systems.