A Case Study of the Effects of Architecture Debt on Software Evolution Effort

In large-scale software systems, the majority of defective files are architecturally connected, and the architecture connections usually exhibit design flaws, which are associated with higher change-proneness among files and higher maintenance costs. As software evolves with bug fixes, new features, or improvements, unresolved architecture design flaws can contribute to maintenance difficulties. The impact on effort due to architecture design flaws has been difficult to quantify and justify. In this paper, we conducted a case study where we identified flawed architecture relations and quantified their effects on maintenance activities. Using data from this project's source code and revision history, we identified file groups where files are architecturally connected and participated in flawed architecture designs, quantified the maintenance activities in the detected files, and assessed the penalty related to these files.

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