1 research outputs found
Architecture Smells vs. Concurrency Bugs: an Exploratory Study and Negative Results
Technical debt occurs in many different forms across software artifacts. One
such form is connected to software architectures where debt emerges in the form
of structural anti-patterns across architecture elements, namely, architecture
smells. As defined in the literature, ``Architecture smells are recurrent
architectural decisions that negatively impact internal system quality", thus
increasing technical debt. In this paper, we aim at exploring whether there
exist manifestations of architectural technical debt beyond decreased code or
architectural quality, namely, whether there is a relation between architecture
smells (which primarily reflect structural characteristics) and the occurrence
of concurrency bugs (which primarily manifest at runtime). We study 125
releases of 5 large data-intensive software systems to reveal that (1) several
architecture smells may in fact indicate the presence of concurrency problems
likely to manifest at runtime but (2) smells are not correlated with
concurrency in general -- rather, for specific concurrency bugs they must be
combined with an accompanying articulation of specific project characteristics
such as project distribution. As an example, a cyclic dependency could be
present in the code, but the specific execution-flow could be never executed at
runtime