Exploring the Impact of Architectural Smells Refactoring in Microservice Projects

Refactoring code smells in a project can be easily done, while refactoring architectural smells is a more complex task that could have different effects on the overall quality of a project. Architectural smells represent one of the greatest sources of technical debt faced by practitioners and are symptoms of architectural degradation. In this paper, we investigate the impact of the refactoring of architectural smells on technical debt and other software quality metrics. We focus our attention on smells found in microservice projects and also explore whether the refactoring of these smells can support the identification of new microservices. We analyze microservice projects due to the increasing interest in this kind of software architecture from academia and practitioners. The results obtained outline how architectural smells refactoring has to be carefully taken into account in order to improve software quality and reduce technical debt.