An experience report on detecting and repairing software architecture erosion

Architecture erosion constitutes the most visible effect of the degradation of design. It is a major reason to address the design debt, often caused by architectural mismatch problems. Today, the identification of design erosion is a major concern for designers and software maintainers. Adequate tools are necessary to identify and repair the debt. This paper describes our experience on identifying architectural erosion problems on existing open source software applications through the support of two well known tools. Moreover, we outline if the tools provide useful hints in repairing some of the detected problems.