Visualizing Design Erosion: How Big Balls of Mud are Made

TL;DR

This paper introduces a visualization tool for tracking design erosion in evolving Java programs by highlighting antipatterns, aiding engineers in maintaining system quality.

Contribution

It presents a novel visualization approach that exposes antipatterns and their growth in software design, helping to combat design erosion.

Findings

Effective in identifying antipatterns in case studies

Assists engineers in tracing design degradation

Improves understanding of design erosion dynamics

Abstract

Software systems are not static, they have to undergo frequent changes to stay fit for purpose, and in the process of doing so, their complexity increases. It has been observed that this process often leads to the erosion of the systems design and architecture and with it, the decline of many desirable quality attributes, such as maintainability. This process can be captured in terms of antipatterns-atomic violations of widely accepted design principles. We present a visualisation that exposes the design of evolving Java programs, highlighting instances of selected antipatterns including their emergence and cancerous growth. This visualisation assists software engineers and architects in assessing, tracing and therefore combating design erosion. We evaluated the effectiveness of the visualisation in four case studies with ten participants.