Toward a Catalogue of Architectural Bad Smells Joshua Garcia, Daniel Popescu, and George Edwards Ph.D. Student, Computer Science Department Advisor: Nenad Medvidovic University of Southern California, Los Angeles

Abstract

An architectural bad smell is a commonly (although not always intentionally) used set of architectural design decisions that negatively impacts system lifecycle properties, such as understandability, testability, extensibility, and reusability. In this work, we describe in detail four representative architectural smells that emerged from reverse-engineering and re-engineering two large industrial systems and from our search through case studies in research literature. For each of the four architectural smells, we provide illustrative examples and demonstrate the smell’s impact on system lifecycle properties. Our experiences indicate the need to identify and catalog architectural smells so that software architects can discover and eliminate them from system designs.

 

Bio

Joshua Garcia is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC). His advisor is Nenad Medvidovic. Joshua is a member of the Software Architecture Research Group at the Center for Systems and Software Engineering at USC. His current research interests are in software architecture reconstruction, program comprehension, and software architecture for embedded systems. His industrial experience includes working as a research assistant at the Southern California Earthquake Center at USC and interning at Xerox Special Information Systems.