Context: Architecture of a software system represents the key design decisions and therefore its quality plays an important role to keep the software maintainable. Code smells are indicators of quality issues in a software system and are classified based on their granularity, scope, and impact. Despite a plethora of existing work on smells, a detailed exploration of architecture smells, their characteristics, and their relationships with smells in other granularities is missing. Objective: The paper aims to study architecture smells characteristics, investigate correlation, collocation, and causation relationships between architecture and design smells. Method: We implement smell detection support for seven architecture smells. We mine 3 073 open-source repositories containing more than 118 million lines of C# code and empirically investigate the relationships between seven architecture and 19 design smells. Results: We find that smell density does not depend on repository size. Cumulatively, architecture smells are highly correlated with design smells. Our collocation analysis finds that the majority of design and architecture smell pairs do not exhibit collocation. Finally, our causality analysis reveals that design smells cause architecture smells.

中文翻译：

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设计与建筑气味关系的实证研究

上下文：软件系统的架构代表了关键的设计决策，因此其质量对于保持软件的可维护性起着重要作用。代码异味是软件系统中质量问题的指标，并根据其粒度、范围和影响进行分类。尽管有大量关于气味的现有工作，但缺少对架构气味、它们的特征以及它们与其他粒度的气味的关系的详细探索。目的：研究建筑气味特征，考察建筑气味与设计气味之间的相关性、搭配性和因果关系。方法：我们实现了对七种架构气味的气味检测支持。我们挖掘了 3 073 个包含超过 1.18 亿行 C# 代码的开源存储库，并根据经验研究了 7 种架构和 19 种设计风格之间的关系。结果：我们发现气味密度与存储库大小无关。累积起来，建筑气味与设计气味高度相关。我们的搭配分析发现，大多数设计和架构气味对没有表现出搭配。最后，我们的因果关系分析表明，设计气味会导致架构气味。