Determining Enterprise Architecture Smells from Software Architecture Smells

Software Architectural Smells (SA smells) are design problems in the internal structure and behavior of an SA. These can be seen as a specific category under the umbrella concept of Technical Debt (TD). TD is a central concept in software development projects and having the means to detect and measure the smells is important to understand impairments they may cause. However, TD is only limited to the technical aspects and does not describe smells found on an enterprise level. Enterprise Architecture Debt (EAD) expands the concepts of TD beyond the technical aspects such that it covers the debts that can be found in all layers of an Enterprise Architecture (EA). EA smells give a measurement for EAD, by providing means for detecting the smell, hence enabling a method to quantify the level of debt. The goal of this paper is to find EA smells derived from existing SA smells. This has resulted in three new EA smells that could be used as measurements for the quality of an EA. They can also be used in the future as a basis for automatic EA smell detection.