Impact of Refactoring Architectural Smells on Quality, Security, and Performance Metrics

Architectural smells have been widely studied in the literature, and some approaches have been developed to assess their impact on software quality metrics. Yet, empirical evidence bridging architectural smells and software quality metrics, while jointly considering security and performance issues, is limited. In this study, we investigate whether refactoring architectural smells can improve software quality and address security and performance issues that frequently occur in open-source projects. To this end, we analyze software code across various application domains and automatically detect architectural smells, as well as security and performance issues, using a diverse set of tools. Then, we manually remove detected instances of architectural smells and check whether their removal affects quality, security, and performance metrics originally collected in the selected projects. Our results indicate that refactoring architectural smells improves software quality and performance indicators, but we observe a less significant impact on security vulnerabilities.