Relating Architectural Decay and Sustainability of Software Systems

Ensuring the longevity of a software system is an important concern for developers and maintainers. However, when a system's architecture decays during evolution and its quality degrades as a result, the system's long-term sustainability is highly affected. In this light, providing mediums to estimate and track the sustainability of a software system is necessary to help engineers stay aware of system health. Most existing techniques and tools estimate the level of sustainability in code, paying significantly less attention to the analysis and understanding of architectural decay. This position paper provides a taxonomy of architectural smells, metrics, and their impacted quality properties. We relate these smells to maintenance and evolution areas as a first step toward our ultimate goal of estimating the sustainability of systems. We finally report some initial results drawn from a set of subject systems as promising future work using our taxonomy.