Splicing Community and Software Architecture Smells in Agile Teams: An industrial Study

Abstract

Software engineering nowadays largely relies on agile methods to carry out software development. In often highly distributed organizations, agile teams can develop organisational and socio-technical issues loosely defined as community smells, which reflect sub-optimal organisational configurations that bear additional project cost, a phenomenon called social debt. In this paper we look into the co-occurrence of such nasty organisational phenomena—community smells—with software architecture smells—indicators that software architectures may exhibit sub-optimal modularization structures, with consequent additional cost. We conclude that community smells can serve as a guide to steer the qualities of software architectures within agile teams.