Identifying Architectural Bad Smells

Abstract

Certain design fragments in software architectures can have a negative impact on system maintainability. In this paper, we introduce the concept of architectural "bad smells," which are frequently recurring software designs that can have non-obvious and significant detrimental effects on system lifecycle properties. We define architectural smells and differentiate them from related concepts, such as architectural antipatterns and code smells. We also describe four representative architectural smells we encountered in the context of reverse-engineering eighteen grid technologies and refactoring one large industrial system.