Software Architecture in Practice, 4th Edition

23

Managing Architecture Debt

With Yuanfang Cai

Some debts are fun when you are acquiring them, but none are fun when you set about retiring them.

—Ogden Nash

Without careful attention and the input of effort, designs become harder to maintain and evolve over time. We call this form of entropy “architecture debt,” and it is an important and highly costly form of technical debt. The broad field of technical debt has been intensively studied for more than a decade—primarily focusing on code debt. Architecture debt is typically more difficult to detect and more difficult to eradicate than code debt because it involves nonlocal concerns. The tools and methods that work well for discovering code debt—code inspections, code quality checkers, and so ...