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Top1. Introduction
Over the past decade, software architecture is getting increasing attention within the software engineering field. Software architecture plays a prominent role in a stage of software development overall. It pertains to systems attributes and the high-level structure (Perry & Wolf, 1992), (Shaw & Garlan, 1996). Thereby, the analysis and highlight of critical early design decisions make a focal point for attention on an architecture (Klein et al., 1999). The sound architecture is a crucial success factor for the development and design of the systems (David Garlan, 2000) and has a considerable acceptance within the industry and research (Hochstein & Lindvall, 2005).
Although software architecture accomplishments are enormous, some problems remain. This includes the complexity, high cost of maintenance, and architectural erosion that represent the difference in concepts between the implemented architecture and intended architecture (Eick, Graves, Karr, Marron, & Mockus, 2001), (MacCormack, Rusnak, & Baldwin, 2006), (Godfrey & Lee, 2000). The software architecture is usually degraded during the systems' evolution process (Lehman, 1979). This leads Inevitably to progressive quality degeneration over time. The two most prevalent architectural problems affecting software systems negatively are drift and erosion. This decay does not take place overnight, but rather it's cumulative impacts through many issues, adding new features, repairing bugs, software evolves constantly, and accumulating architectural debt.
Although the previous works covered various aspects concerning maintaining architecture from the erosion and several current studies with a wide focus on classifications between methods and technologies in general. However, the common factor in the existing studies does not provide full detail about the empirical analysis, pay attention to perceptions of the existing approaches analysis to identify used strategies in providing and clarifying architectural decay solutions, and trendy track of the architectural decay research to clarify the evolution of the meaningful essential research tendencies that concerns researchers within architectural decay domain. In this paper, we will work accurately on the description of the empirical analysis, approaches, and trends for studies that have been evaluated to architectural decay.
Our study can be summarized over three key contributions as follows:
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We present a comprehensive survey and profound investigation of existing approaches analysis, adopted empirical analysis, and trendy track within architectural decay domain, which can be used as starting point to extend the knowledge on the area.
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We analyze the existing approaches according to a convergence of their solutions and strategies to identify the most commonly used of solutions in the architectural decay.
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We categorize trendy research to provide the researchers over the trendy track regarding the meaningful idea that occupies many researchers by addressing the most issues for the included studies.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: the background of the architectural decay is explained in section 2. The related work is presented in section 3. The research process and study procedure are clarified in section 4. The discussion is explained in section 5. The threats of the study are demonstrated in section 6. The conclusion is drawn in section 7.