What Software Architecture Styles are Popular?

One can meet the software architecture style's notion in the software engineering literature. This notion is considered important in books on software architecture and university sources. However, many software developers are not so optimistic about it. It is not clear, whether this notion is just an academic concept, or is actually used in the software industry. In this paper, we measured industrial software developers' attitudes towards the concept of software architecture style. We also investigated the popularity of eleven concrete architecture styles. We applied two methods. A developers’ survey was applied to estimate developers' overall attitude and define what the community thinks about the automatic recognition of software architecture styles. Automatic crawlers were applied to mine the open-source code from the GitHub platform. These crawlers identified style smells in repositories using the features we proposed for the architecture styles.  We found that the notion of software architecture style is not just a concept of academics in universities. Many software developers apply this concept in their work. We formulated features for the eleven concrete software architecture styles and developed crawlers based on these features. The results of repository mining using the features showed which styles are popular among developers of open-source projects from commercial companies and non-commercial communities. Automatic mining results were additionally validated by the Github developers survey.

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