Technical debt (TD) has been recognized as an important quality problem for both software architecture and code. The evolution of TD techniques over the past years has led to a number of research and commercial tools. In addition, the increasing trend of opportunistic reuse (as opposed to systematic reuse), where developers reuse code assets in popular repositories, is changing the way components are selected and integrated into existing systems. However, reusing software opportunistically can lead to a loss of quality and induce TD, especially when the architecture is changed in the process. However, to the best of our knowledge, no studies have investigated the impact of opportunistic reuse in TD. In this paper, we carry out an exploratory study to investigate to what extent reusing components opportunistically negatively affects the quality of systems. We use one commercial and one research tool to analyze the TD ratios of three case systems, before and after opportunistically extending them with open-source software.

Abstract Usability is a highly desired but often ignored software quality. Effective user interfaces tend to increase learnability, effectiveness and user satisfaction. But usability is often neglected in the early stages of software development and is thus frequently not address in a system's architectural design. Furthermore, because usability is often neglected or deferred, it is difficult to estimate the effort specifically spent on adding or improving usability mechanisms in the software architecture and in code. In this work, we present a case study where we analyze the impact of introducing a variety of usability mechanisms to a mobile application and we report on the architectural changes that must be made in the software architecture to accommodate them. We also report on the additional code required to implement these usability mechanisms and we investigate the users' satisfaction of combining and using several usability mechanisms in a mobile application. Finally, we evaluated user responses—both positive and negatives—to these usability mechanisms via a questionnaire involving 25 users from different roles and different organizations and including contextual interviews to analyze the qualitative responses of the subjects. Our results show that apart from the relatively modest modeling and coding effort, the combination of several usability mechanisms seems beneficial for users of mobile systems and increases the satisfaction during the interaction with the system.

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.

Capturing and using design rationale is becoming a hot topic for software architects, as architectural design decisions are now considered first class entities that should be recorded and documented explicitly. Capturing such architecture knowledge has been underestimated for several years as architects have been only focused on documenting their architectures and neglecting the rationale that led to them. The importance of recording design rationale becomes enormous for maintenance and evolution activities, as design decisions can be replayed in order to avoid highly cost architecture recovery processes. Hence, in this work we describe how architecture design decisions can be captured and documented with specific tool support. We also provide effort estimation in capturing such knowledge and we compare this with architecture modeling efforts in order to analyze the viability of knowledge capturing strategies.

This paper describes the ADDSS tool which enables capturing and documenting architectural design decisions in order to avoid knowledge vaporization.