Featured Scents: Towards Assessing Architectural Smells for Self-Adaptive Systems at Runtime

Description

Self-adaptive systems (SAS) change their behavior and structure at runtime to answer the changes in their en- vironment. Such systems combine different architectural frag- ments or solutions via feature binding/unbinding at runtime. Moreover, this combination may negatively impact the system’s architectural qualities, exhibiting architectural bad smells (ABS). These issues are challenging to detect in the code due to the combinatorial explosion of interactions amongst features. Since SAS does not document these features in their source code, design time smell detection ignores them and risks reporting smells that are different than those observed at runtime. This paper assesses this risk to understand how ABS occurs at runtime for different feature combinations. We look for cyclic dependency and hub- like ABS in various runtime adaptations of two SAS, Adasim and mRubis. Our results indicate that architectural smells are feature-dependent and that their number is highly variable from one adaptation to the other. Some ABS appear in all runtime adaptations, some in only a few. We discuss the reasons behind these architectural smells for each system and motivate the need for targeted ABS analyses in SAS.

Period	13 Mar 2022
Event title	19th International Conference on Software Architecture
Event type	Conference
Location	Honolulu, United States, HawaiiShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International