Using Expert Systems for Investigating The Impact of Architectural Anomalies on Software Reuse

Architectural projects are constantly modified during their evolution. These modifications, when unplanned, contribute to the occurrence of architectural anomalies, which can be defined as unwanted symptoms that negatively affect the project quality attributes. In particular, the architectural components reuse. However, there is no means for detecting architectural anomalies in an intelligent way. Perhaps due to this limitation, there are also no studies to investigate the impact of architectural anomalies in the reuse of architectural components. In this context, this paper (i) proposes an expert approach to the detection of architectural anomalies and (ii) analyzes the impact of the detected anomalies on the reuse of architectural components of two evolving software systems. The results showed that both systems have anomalies in their architectural projects and that these anomalies are responsible for negatively affecting the reuse of their architectural components.