PageRank and criticality of architectural smells

Architectural smells represent symptoms of problems at architectural level that can negatively impact internal software qualities and lead to architectural debt. Detecting architectural smells and identifying the most critical ones is the key to prioritize refactoring efforts and prevent software architecture erosion. In this paper we focus our attention on three architectural smells based on dependency issues, called Cyclic Dependency, Unstable Dependency, and Hub-Like Dependency. Moreover, we evaluate the PageRank and Criticality of these smells through the analysis of six projects. PageRank is a measure that estimates whether an architectural smell is located in an important part of the project, where the importance is evaluated according to how many parts of a project depend on the one involved in the architectural smell. We describe a case study on the analysis of the possible relation existing between the PageRank and Criticality of the smells. The results show how the two measures can be both used to locate the architectural smells that need particular inspections and attention.