Warnings: Violation Symptoms Indicating Architecture Erosion

TL;DR

This study analyzes code review comments to identify architecture violation symptoms, categorizing their linguistic patterns and developer reactions, to better understand and prevent architecture erosion in evolving software systems.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic analysis of violation symptoms in code reviews, revealing categories, linguistic patterns, and developer responses to aid architecture erosion management.

Findings

10 categories of violation symptoms identified

Frequent terms include 'inconsistent' and 'violate'

Refactoring and code removal are primary responses

Abstract

As a software system evolves, its architecture tends to degrade, and gradually impedes software maintenance and evolution activities and negatively impacts the quality attributes of the system. The main root cause behind architecture erosion phenomenon derives from violation symptoms (such as violations of architecture pattern). Previous studies focus on detecting violations in software systems using architecture conformance checking approaches. However, code review comments are also rich sources that may contain extensive discussions regarding architecture violations. In this work, we investigated the characteristics of architecture violation symptoms in code review comments from the developers' perspective. We employed a set of keywords related to violation symptoms to collect 606 (out of 21,583) code review comments from four popular OSS projects in the OpenStack and Qt communities. We manually analyzed the collected 606 review comments to provide the categories and linguistic patterns of violation symptoms, as well as the reactions how developers addressed them. Our findings show that: (1) 10 categories of violation symptoms are discussed by developers during the code review process; (2) The frequently-used terms of expressing violation symptoms are "inconsistent" and "violate", and the most frequently-used linguistic pattern is Problem Discovery; (3) Refactoring and removing code are the major measures (90%) to tackle violation symptoms, while a few violation symptoms were ignored by developers. Our findings suggest that the investigation of violation symptoms can help researchers better understand the characteristics of architecture erosion and facilitate the development and maintenance activities, and developers should explicitly manage violation symptoms, not only for addressing the existing architecture violations but also preventing future violations.