Evidence in architecture degradation and consistency checking research: preliminary results from a literature review

Theory suggests that software development may benefit from applying architecture consistency checking and hence, academics have focused on this area. In such circumstances it is important to characterize the overall focus of the field, in order to assess the actual impact of the research work carried out to date, identifying where researchers are placing their effort and which sub-topics are being neglected. In doing so a map is provided for researchers allowing them focus on relevant research gaps and avoiding saturated sub-topics, to deliver results relevant for academia and industrial practice. The goal of this paper is to shed some light on the current state of research in software architecture degradation and consistency checking, particularly focusing on empirical evidence. Preliminary, yet significant results from an ongoing mapping study, as a precursor to a more detailed literature review, are presented and discussed. These results show that solution-proposals constitute a large part of the body of work. In addition, they show that case studies, with potentially limited external validity, are prevalent in terms of empirical design. We argue that the proportion of empirical studies needs to be expanded and that existing case studies should be complemented by experiments and surveys, assessing its impact in practice.