The quality of software architecture is an important concern for any software development team. Architecture smells represent quality issues at architecture granularity. Identifying and refactoring them periodically is a necessity to keep architecture quality high. We present Designite, a software design quality assessment tool, that identifies seven well-known architecture smells. Along with the identification, the tool provides supplementary information such as cause and responsible classes for each identified smell instance to help developers understand and refactor the smell. The tool is relevant and useful in both research and practice context. Software developers may use it to identify technical debt instances and to refactor them. On the other hand, software engineering researchers may use the tool to carry out large-scale empirical studies concerning code smells.

Tushar Sharma is a researcher at Athens University of Economics and Business, Athens, Greece. The topics related to software design and architecture, refactoring, software quality (more specifically code and design quality), and technical debt define his career interests. He has worked with Siemens Research and Technology Center, Bangalore, India for more than 7 years. He earned an MS degree in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras, Chennai, India, where he specialized in design patterns and refactoring. He co-authored the book “Refactoring for Software Design Smells: Managing Technical Debt”. He has also co-authored two Oracle Java certification books. He has developed Designite which is a software design quality assessment tool used by many practitioners and researchers worldwide. He is an IEEE Senior Member.