Taxonomy of Architecture Maintainability Smells

Context. Architecture maintainability smells indicate software quality problems and suggest necessary architecture refactorings. However, there are numerous names for a single smell, including synonyms and subclasses, and the number keeps increasing. This situation leads to confusion and difficulty in identifying the underlying problems. Objective. To address this challenge, we want to organize the existing smells. Method. We collect smell names through a systematic literature review, followed by a four-step data analysis leading to a taxonomy of maintainability smells, comprising smell characteristics, categories, detection methods, and causes. Results. We found 549 architecture smell names in 189 references, from which we identified 318 maintainability smell names. We derived the distinguishing characteristics and reduced the list to 19 essential maintainability smells. Conclusions. Our taxonomy provides an overview of essential maintainability smells, making future research and discussions more manageable. Moreover, the identified synonyms make existing research comparable, and the characteristics, causes, and detection methods provide a framework for classifying future smells.