ATDx: Building an architectural technical debt index

Architectural technical debt (ATD) in software-intensive systems refers to the architecture design decisions which work as expedient in the short term, but later negatively impact system evolvability and maintainability. Over the years numerous approaches have been proposed to detect particular types of ATD at a refined level of granularity via source code analysis. Nevertheless, how to gain an encompassing overview of the ATD present in a software-intensive system is still an open question. In this study, we present a multi-step approach designed to build an ATD index (ATDx), which provides insights into a set of ATD dimensions building upon existing architectural rules by leveraging statistical analysis. The ATDx approach can be adopted by researchers and practitioners alike in order to gain a better understanding of the nature of the ATD present in software-intensive systems, and provides a systematic framework to implement concrete instances of ATDx according to specific project and organizational needs.