Architectural Archipelagos: Technical Debt in Long-Lived Software Research Platforms
This addresses the problem of technical debt in academic research software, which is incremental as it models existing issues without proposing a new solution.
The paper identifies a prevalent model of software evolution in large, long-lived academic research tool suites, termed 'archipelagos', which leads to haphazard organization and technical debt, as illustrated with examples from two such archipelagos found in literature.
This paper identifies a model of software evolution that is prevalent in large, long-lived academic research tool suites (3L-ARTS). This model results in an "archipelago" of related but haphazardly organized architectural "islands", and inherently induces technical debt. We illustrate the archipelago model with examples from two 3L-ARTS archipelagos identified in literature.