Evaluating the Architectural Debt of IoT Projects

We observed a great and increasing interest in the last few years towards the evaluation of technical debt of software projects, in particular in the direction of code and architectural debt evaluation. This kind of analysis has not yet been performed for IoT projects. Hence, in this paper we start this exploration through the analysis of four Open Source IoT projects. We focus our attention on architectural debt and we exploit a tool, called Arcan, developed for architectural smell detection and for the computation of an architectural debt index. The results show that also IoT projects are subjected to architectural debt, and in particular to the presence of Cyclic Dependency and Unstable Dependency smells. However, there is evidence that the continuous refactoring of the code helps in avoiding the increase of debt, hence also developers of IoT projects should schedule periodical clean-ups of their code.