Tool support for evaluating architectural debt of an existing system: An experience report

During software development, maintenance and evolution, we can assess the quality of code, design and architecture to capture hints of possible problems and face them as soon as possible. We can capture signals of architecture erosion in different ways by exploiting several tools with the aim to identify architectural violations, architectural smells or other relevant features. In this paper, we provide our experience report in using three known tools to capture information that can be useful to identify and evaluate the architectural debt of an application. We outline the main differences among these tools and the results they produce.